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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: 0.208s | 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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rubyfan ◴[03 Dec 23 20:02 UTC] No.38510231[source]▶
> If they haven't actually done it by now, it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that.

This. Further, it’s a failure to continue to disincentivize roles that will support or port this business critical logic to something else. I worked at a large insurer where they slowly laid off mainframe talent over the last decade. Those mainframe salaries were counter to the narrative they were promoting around cloud being the future. Unfortunately in their haste to create optics they failed to migrate any of the actual code or systems from mainframe to cloud.

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GenerWork ◴[04 Dec 23 04:23 UTC] No.38513728[source]▶
Did the remaining mainframers demand a higher salary to stay on, or did the insurance company have to hire outside contractors at exorbiant rates to migrate everything over?
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1. rubyfan ◴[04 Dec 23 11:27 UTC] No.38515997[source]▶
Kind of the later I guess. Not much migrated really. When I left they were grappling with which major migration to do next, each to the tune of tens of millions each with no business benefit. In that industry there is momentum toward specialty tech platforms to save the day. Out of the frying pan into the fryer.