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Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

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Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#181

Post by elzbardico »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #173
rramadass wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key to understanding their longevity lies in the fact that they were the earliest high-level languages invented at a time when all software was built for serious long-lived stuff viz. Banking, Insurance, Finance, Simulations, Numerical Analysis, Embedded etc. Computing was strictly Science/Mathematics/Business and so a lot of very smart domain experts and programmers built systems to last from the ground up.

> a time when all software was built for serious long-lived stuff I sometimes lament that most of the code I've written for work will probably be retired before me.

Don't be so optimistic.

One of these days I was at a small grocery store in my hometown, and saw the screen of a POS system I had built in the late 90s with Visual C++ 6 running on Windows 10. The guy told me he got the system from the previous store owner he bought the shop from, it did most of he wanted it to do, and that his son is the guy who do things like upgrading the hardware, and writing small python programs that talk to the same SQLServer database to extend the system and implement some integration, so he sees no reason to get another system.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#182

Post by krupan »

pjmlp wrote: post #64
krupan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any compiler that "rolls the dice" when it comes to optimizations? Like, if you compile the exact same code with the exact same compiler multiple times you'll get different assembly? And th Alan Kay quote is great but does not apply here at all? I'm pointing out how silly it is to compare LLMs to compilers. That's all.

Rolling the dice is accomplished by mixing optimizations flags, PGO data and what parts of the CPU get used. Or by using a managed language with dynamic compiler (aka JIT) and GC. They are also not deterministic when executed, and what outcome gets produced, it is all based on heuristics and measured probabilities. Yes, the quote does apply because many cannot grasp the idea of how technology looks beyond today.

You are waaaaay over exaggerating the non-deterministic nature of compiled code if you think it's anywhere near the ballpark of how unpredictable LLMs are.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#183

Post by jamesfinlayson »

elzbardico wrote: post #181
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a time when all software was built for serious long-lived stuff I sometimes lament that most of the code I've written for work will probably be retired before me.

Don't be so optimistic. One of these days I was at a small grocery store in my hometown, and saw the screen of a POS system I had built in the late 90s with Visual C++ 6 running on Windows 10. The guy told me he got the system from the previous store owner he bought the shop from, it did most of he wanted it to do, and that his son is the guy who do things like upgrading the hardware, and writing small python program…

Nice. I hope anything I've done lasts that long, but most of my jobs have been solving long-solved problems by yet another player in the market, so I expect it will all get decommission sooner or later as these companies either die or change hands.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#184

Post by jmalicki »

antonvs wrote: post #172
jmalicki wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this an issue specifically with Rust and Haskell? Do you find that LLMs have an easier time proving global correctness with C, Python, or Typescript?

Yes, because those other languages all have much weaker type systems.

Do you have examples of LLMs proving global correctness for say, C? Having worked on static analysis for both C and Rust, Rust is the easier problem because of the type system, but I am eager to be proven wrong!

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#185

Post by sai18 »

randomsc wrote: post #132

I am working as a Software engineer in a European bank. There is a huge multi year program to remove COBOL as much as possible with cloud based Java Spring application. The main reason is maintainability. There is no more cobol developers coming. Existing ones close to retirement or already retired.

You’re describing the pattern we’re seeing across most companies who are still on COBOL.

The shortage of COBOL engineers is real but the harder problem is enterprise scale system understanding. Most modernization efforts stall not because COBOL is inherently a difficult language, but because of the sheer scale and volume of these enterprise codebases. It's tens of thousands of files, if not millions, spanning 40+ years with a handful of engineers left or no one at all.

We're exploring some of this work at Hypercubic (https://www.hypercubic.ai/, YC-backed) if you're curious to learn more.

With the current reasoning models, we now have the capability to build large scale agentic AI for mainframe system understanding. This is going beyond line-by-line code understanding to reason across end-to-end system behavior and capturing institutional knowledge that’s otherwise lost as SMEs retire.

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#187

Post by nevinainfotechs »

alexpham14 wrote: post #98

Compliance is usually the hard stop before we even get to capability. We can’t send code out, and local models are too heavy to run on the restricted VDI instances we’re usually stuck with. Even when I’ve tried it on isolated sandbox code, it struggles with the strict formatting. It tends to drift past column 72 or mess up period termination in nested IFs. You end up spending more time linting the output than it take…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

#190

Post by tomcam »

christophilus wrote: post #180
tomcam wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you call COBOL from VB.NET? Was it just a matter of shelling to COBOL and writing out text files that VB.NET consumed, or COM interprocess calls, or what?

The COBOL layer had a TCP server somewhere in it (don’t know the details of that). We simply made TCP calls directly, sending and receiving fixed-sized records.

Ah! Relief. I wouldn't have known how to search for that.
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