https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/22/ibm-taps-ai-to-translate-cobol-code-to-java/

COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959. It’s had surprising staying power; according to a 2022 survey, there’s over 800 billion lines of COBOL in use on production systems, up from an estimated 220 billion in 2017.

But COBOL has a reputation for being a tough-to-navigate, inefficient language. Why not migrate to a newer one? For large organizations, it tends to be a complex and costly proposition, given the small number of COBOL experts in the world. When the Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced its core COBOL platform in 2012, it took five years and cost over $700 million.