It’s not the 1st time a language/tool will be lost to the annals of the job market, eg VB6 or FoxPro. Though previously all such cases used to happen gradually, giving most people enough time to adapt to the changes.
I wonder what’s it going to be like this time now that the machine, w/ the help of humans of course, can accomplish an otherwise multi-month risky corporate project much faster? What happens to all those COBOL developer jobs?
Pray share your thoughts, esp if you’re a COBOL professional and have more context around the implication of this announcement 🙏
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Converting ancient code to a more modern language seems like a great use for AI, in all honesty. Not a lot of COBOL devs out there but once it’s Java the amount of coders available to fix/improve whatever ChatGPT spits out jumps exponentially!
The fact that you say that tells me that you don’t know very much about software engineering. This whole thing is a terrible idea, and has the potential to introduce tons of incredibly subtle bugs and security flaws. ML + LLM is not ready to be used for stuff like this at the moment in anything outside of an experimental context. Engineers are generally - and with very good reason - deeply wary of “too much magic” and this stuff falls squarely into that category.
All of that is mentioned in the article. Given how much it cost last time a company tried to convert from COBOL, don’t be surprised when you see more businesses opt for this cheaper path. Even if it only converts half of the codebase, that’s still a huge improvement.
Doing this manually is a tall order…
Yeah, I read the article.
They’re MASSIVELY handwaving a lot of detail away. Moreover, they’re taking the “we’ll fix it in post” approach by suggesting “we can just run an armful of security analysis software on the code after the system spits something out”. While that’s a great sentiment, you (and everyone considering this approach) needs to consider that complex systems are pretty much NEVER perfect. There WILL be misses. Add this to the fact that a ton of organizations that still use COBOL are banks - which are generally considered fairly critical to the day-to-day operation of our society, and you can see why I am incredibly skeptical of this whole line of thinking.
I’m sure the IBM engineers who made the thing are extremely good at what they do, but at the same time, I have a lot less faith in the organizations that will actually employ the system. In fact, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked to find that banks would assign an inappropriately junior engineer to the task - perhaps even an intern - because “it’s as simple as invoking a processing pipeline”. This puts a truly hilarious amount of trust into what’s effectively a black box.
Additionally, for a good engineer, learning any given programming language isn’t actually that hard. And if these transition efforts are done in what I would consider to be the right way, you’d also have a team of engineers who know both the input and output languages such that they can go over (at the very, very least) critical and logically complex areas of the code to ensure accuracy. But since this is all about saving money, I’d bet that step simply won’t be done.
For those who have never worked on legacy systems. Any one who suggests “we’ll fix it in post” is asking you to do something that just CANNOT happen.
The systems I code for, if something breaks, we’re going to court over it. Not, oh no let’s patch it real quick, it’s your ass is going to be cross examined on why the eff your system just wrote thousands of legal contracts that cannot be upheld as valid.
Yeah, that fix it in post shit any article, especially this one that’s linked, suggests should be considered trash that has no remote idea how deep in shit one can be if you start getting wild hairs up your ass for changing out parts of a critical system.
So a ‘compiler’ then? From a fairly straightforward easy to use COBOL to whatever. makes sense. can the new code work in the mainframe environment? or is that what this piracy is about?
har har har.
:D
That’s alot of effort to go from one horrible programming language to another horrible programming language.
