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

(www.pcmag.com)
127 points Anon84 | 2 comments | 03 Dec 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.62s | source
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ufmace ◴[03 Dec 23 17:53 UTC] No.38509082[source]▶
The article title is clickbaity, but the actual point is the proposal of using LLMs to translate large amounts of legacy COBOL systems to more modern languages like Java. Doesn't seem terribly useful to me. I expect you could get a 90% solution faster, but the whole challenge with these projects is how to get that last bit of correctness, and how to be confident enough in the correctness of it to actually use it in Production.

But then all of this has been known for decades. There are plenty of well-known techniques for how to do all that. If they haven't actually done it by now, it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that.

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IshKebab ◴[03 Dec 23 19:36 UTC] No.38509995[source]▶
I'm pretty sure there's already a system to transpile COBOL to Java without resorting to LLMs.
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1. rubyfan ◴[03 Dec 23 20:09 UTC] No.38510301[source]▶
Judging by the branding this is just an attempt to capitalize on the mindshare around LLM and GPT. Recall about 5-8 years ago they tried to sell the notion of huge cost savings replacing humans with the jeopardy champion and tech executives ate it up for a while.
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2. kolinko ◴[04 Dec 23 01:01 UTC] No.38512515[source]▶
Well, they essentially had the same idea as OpenAI with GPT, just they failed to really build it because transformers weren't invented yet.

But their business cases were similar to what we see now with LLMs.