Java To Python And Back, AI That Translates Programming Languages

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia spent around $750 million and 5 years of work to convert its platform from COBOL to Java. Migrating an existing codebase to a modern or more efficient language like Java or C++ requires expertise in both the source and target languages, and is often costly.  Usually, a transcompiler is deployed that converts source code from a high-level programming language (such as C++ or Python) to another. Transcompilers are primarily used for interoperability, and to port codebases written in an obsolete or deprecated language (e.g. COBOL, Python 2) to a modern one.  They typically rely on handcrafted rewrite rules, applied to the source code abstract syntax tree. Unfortunately, the resulting translations often lack readability, fail to respect the ta