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Watsonx: IBM's code assistant for turning COBOL into Java

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127 points Anon84 | 9 comments | 03 Dec 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.447s | source | bottom
1. discmonkey ◴[03 Dec 23 17:18 UTC] No.38508712[source]▶
Classic misunderstanding of programming languages. The only thing stopping cobol from being "known" is these companies paying for it.
replies(3): >>38508797 #>>38508990 #>>38509315 #
2. SillyUsername ◴[03 Dec 23 17:26 UTC] No.38508797[source]▶
Chicken and egg, companies stop paying, say no devs, devs not interested as no companies paying for it. Tell me that COBOL to Java porting pays $150K p/a and I'll be happy to take the job, at least for a year or 3.
replies(1): >>38511095 #
3. mlhpdx ◴[03 Dec 23 17:44 UTC] No.38508990[source]▶
It’s more than that. If you spend a couple or more years learning to maintain those systems, where else will you work? Will you find a co-founder or investor for a COBOL based system when you go “entrepreneur”? Maybe, but it better be a damn strong niche.

Not moving forward with the software industry is a weird kind of conceit that separates these companies from the mainstream by far more than money.

replies(2): >>38509423 #>>38509434 #
4. ajross ◴[03 Dec 23 18:13 UTC] No.38509315[source]▶
Pretty much exactly. There are wizards at Project Zero doing reverse engineering of systems at the hardware microcode level. Our own kens shows up every few weeks with transistor level explanations of devices whose designers are long since retired.

And we're supposed to believe that no one in the world can figure out a batch-processed COBOL accounting system? Please. The talent is there, it's just that no one responsible for these systems wants to hire at that level. But in extremis they will, and the world will survive.

5. rightbyte ◴[03 Dec 23 18:26 UTC] No.38509423[source]▶
It still comes down to paying enough money for someone to do it. Pay me twice what I make now and I'll switch to coding absurd legacy all-caps COBOL systems in a heart beat. Probably less then that too.
6. serallak ◴[03 Dec 23 18:27 UTC] No.38509434[source]▶
I don't think it'd take two years to learn cobol, it should be less than that.

But it will take much more than that to learn the gnarly codebase in use in those shops...

And that is a skill that is certainly not transferable.

replies(1): >>38510771 #
7. exhilaration ◴[03 Dec 23 21:06 UTC] No.38510771{3}[source]▶
I don't think it'd take two years to learn cobol, it should be less than that.

There's a comment in this thread from a former consultant that completed a 4 week COBOL bootcamp before being sent to a client to write code!

replies(1): >>38511384 #
8. adra ◴[03 Dec 23 21:48 UTC] No.38511095[source]▶
You work that as a contractor easy if you can find them. The problem is they're rarely hiring one offs to do this because these companies don't have engineering cultures, which is why they contract this shit to system integrators of the world like IBM, then they outsource the work to shoddy consultancy shops to maximize their profits doing basically zero work. If everything goes exceptionally bad (which it did at least in the case I was involved in), then they hire competent contractors to come in and save them from frighteningly large law suits. That's the new dev cycle of these legacy modernizations.. ahh
9. wombatpm ◴[03 Dec 23 22:27 UTC] No.38511384{4}[source]▶
It’s not the language, it’s the business rules and history.

Why is this input file loaded and rechecked 3 times? Because 30 years ago a file load failed, breaking end of quarter reports. This was the fix: if we can read that file three times and it doesn’t change then we know it’s good