←back to thread

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

(www.pcmag.com)
127 points Anon84 | 1 comments | 03 Dec 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.272s | 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 #
1. Cthulhu_ ◴[03 Dec 23 22:01 UTC] No.38511186[source]▶
AI is just one tech, there's been "language X to Y" converters for a long time, including Cobol to Java. To the point where it will compile and at least seem to do the same thing, but... that's the thing with these codebases, verifying that it does the same is the challenge.

I have 0 experience in this field, but I'm willing to take a guess that the majority of a Cobol to X developer's work is not (re)writing code, but figuring out what the original code does, what it's supposed to do, and verify that the new code does the same thing. More testing than programming.