←back to thread

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

(www.pcmag.com)
127 points Anon84 | 3 comments | 03 Dec 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.611s | source
Show context
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.

replies(11): >>38509198 #>>38509418 #>>38509802 #>>38509995 #>>38510231 #>>38510273 #>>38510431 #>>38511157 #>>38511186 #>>38512486 #>>38512716 #
matthewdgreen ◴[03 Dec 23 18:03 UTC] No.38509198[source]▶
How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.
replies(5): >>38509221 #>>38509476 #>>38509483 #>>38510105 #>>38510187 #
vbezhenar ◴[03 Dec 23 18:32 UTC] No.38509476[source]▶
Language is easy, spaghetti code written without any discipline 60 years ago and modified in haste since is hard.
replies(3): >>38510023 #>>38510254 #>>38510732 #
1. JackFr ◴[03 Dec 23 21:02 UTC] No.38510732[source]▶
That is not any COBOL I’ve seen. Straightforward, well documented and comprehensively specified and tested.

When we needed changes (this was back office clearing stuff for a bank) they wouldn’t even talk to us until we specced out the changes we wanted in writing and often the specs we submitted would come back with requests for clarification. This was like the opposite of agile, but I don’t recall any bugs or defects making it into production.

replies(1): >>38511913 #
2. hnlmorg ◴[03 Dec 23 23:32 UTC] No.38511913[source]▶
This was my experience too.

Modern software engineers would hate that kind of red tape because we've been conditioned to want shorter feedback loops. Heck, I hated it back then too and I wasn't even accustomed to seeing my results instantly like I am now. It takes a special kind of person to enjoy the laborious administrative overhead of writing detailed specs before you write even a single line of code.

replies(1): >>38512991 #
3. nunez ◴[04 Dec 23 02:16 UTC] No.38512991[source]▶
Kind of reminds me of taking pure CS101 (I.e. no programming language; just theory and sacrifice)