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127 points Anon84 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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ufmace ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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. danmaz74 ◴[] No.38516136[source]
I was thinking the same. It looks to me like a much safer process could be:

* use some kind of deterministic transpilation that creates ugly code which for sure reproduces the same behaviors

* add tests to cover all those behaviors

* refactor the ugly code

From my experience with copilot I guess that a LLM could help a lot with steps 2 and 3, but I wouldn't trust it at all for step 1