Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pcmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 186 posts

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

#161

Post by jazzyjackson »

snotrockets wrote: post #152
jacquesm wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you get it now though. I've seen this whole industry up close for the last 40 years or so and it's absolutely incredible how we went from a machine with 32 M of RAM and 300 M of storage sufficient to serve 1400 branch offices of a bank to a phone with a very large multiple of that, that can barely serve a single user.

That phone does a lot more than the bank mainframe used to do.

> iphone hangs while trying to match "blu" up with "bluetooth settings"

So many background tasks, much computation

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

#163

Post by mrweasel »

jacquesm wrote: post #130
phasetransition wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Son of a COBOL dev... All this virtualization mess, minus the extra Java layer, started back in the 90s, courtesy of Unisys. I remember my dad pulling his hair out when I was in High School, though I did not understand why back then.

I think you get it now though. I've seen this whole industry up close for the last 40 years or so and it's absolutely incredible how we went from a machine with 32 M of RAM and 300 M of storage sufficient to serve 1400 branch offices of a bank to a phone with a very large multiple of that, that can barely serve a single user.

That is some thing that I can't stop thinking about. I get that banking software does more, like online banking, larger transaction volume, more account and loan types, but why is it that we can not run a small to medium bank on a single modern CPU and 1TB of memory?

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

#164

Post by IshKebab »

dun44 wrote: post #104
IshKebab wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness I imagine an LLM could maybe transpile to more idiomatic code. For example when you transpile FORTRAN to C you get a load of +1s and -1s everywhere to deal with FORTRAN's 1-based indexing. An LLM could avoid that. But I agree, it doesn't make sense to risk bugs just for that.

You could do it with a trivial C macro instead.

The classic HN "trivial" :-D

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

#165

Post by tsimionescu »

nradov wrote: post #109
jacquesm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That happens, but what also happens is that everybody is painfully aware of the situation and they do the best they can. Just like you or I would. And of course, if you start a bank today you'd do the whole cycle all over again, shiny new tech, that in a decade or two is legacy that nobody dares to touch. Because stuff like this is usually industry wide: risk adversity translates into tech debt in the long term. I su…

Why would software technology ever stop moving? To a first approximation it is unconstrained by physical reality (unlike other engineering disciplines) so I expect it will keep moving at roughly the same rate. Maybe even accelerate in some areas. Individual organizations can consciously choose to slow down. Which works for a while in terms of boosting quality and productivity. But over the long run they inevitably fa…

Software technology moves when we figure out new ways of doing software that bring some kind of advantage. If no one is finding new ways to do software that have any purpose, technology will stop moving. Physical reality doesn't really have anything to do with it - we're limited by human ingenuity, and possibly by the mathematical space of algorithms (though that's likely to be much larger).

For an example of this happening in a field, look at the glacial pace of advancement in theoretical physics for the last few decades, compared to 1900s. Or at the pace of development in physics in general in the centuries before.

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

#166

Post by Stratoscope »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #153
Stratoscope wrote: post #86

One correction on the article: "watsonx" (yes, with a lowercase "w" - ugh) is an umbrella brand for several of IBM's "AI" related products. The actual product name for this one is "watsonx Code Assistant for Z", as the author could have found with a simple web search: https://www.google.com/search?q=watsonx+cobol+java https://newsroom.ibm.com/2023-08-22-IBM-Unveils-watsonx-Gene... Disclosure: I work for IBM in "watso…

How do you like the job? (Just curious, no relation with or friends at IBM.)

Like many large companies, IBM discourages us from engaging in "social media" (which I guess includes HN) on work-related questions.

I felt that I could make an exception for the minor correction of the product name.

It's probably not appropriate for me to comment here on how I like the job.

I would be happy to discuss it privately with you or anyone else who is curious. My email address is in my profile; feel free to drop me a note and I will follow up with you.

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

#167

Post by jillesvangurp »

nunez wrote: post #136

Literally today I was checking out of a rental car center and the checkout person loaded up an emulated green screen mainframe program to complete the process. I know for sure that Avis's reservation system runs on mainframe. To me, that means that the business logic of rental car checkout and return is so complicated and/or nuanced, it is cheaper for rental car companies to find/retain mainframe developers to keep t…

I helped a client with some dependencies on Avis and a few other car rental companies a while ago. They indeed have some really old, clunky software. At least judging from the data dumps I had to work with. Also some notable differences in the quality of the data between different providers that I had to work with.

There are plenty of new mobility startups managing just fine without any Cobol or other legacy software. The issue companies like Avis have isn't their software but their lack of competitiveness and ambition level. The car rental business is always changing and they have to somehow adapt with it. And they struggle with that. It's not their software that holds them back but their dependence on things not changing. The software is just a reflection of how uncompetitive they are.

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

#168

Post by coldtea »

GenerWork wrote: post #143
rubyfan wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 arou…

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?

>or did the insurance company have to hire outside contractors at exorbiant rates to migrate everything over

It would be appropriatingly ironic if some or all of those contractors were the same people previously fired.

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

#169

Post by zoom6628 »

kjs3 wrote: post #19
elteto wrote: post #9

These systems have not been running untouched for 60 years. Regulatory environments change almost constantly and the code has to be updated accordingly. I don’t personally know anyone writing COBOL but I’m certain there’s plenty of people doing it. And to change the code you have to know it. So there’s really no 60 year old code that no one knows anymore. Also, at this point, if you are running on a dead platform and…

I’ve been seeing these COBOL articles since the 2000s I believe. Since the '80s for me. And certainly the '90s, since these sort of zero-content articles were very popular in the runup to Y2K: "the entire world is going to end because there are no Cobol programmers anywhere in the world! Everyone panic!". It's still bullshit.

Absolutely. I've seen same since I started as a programmer in COBOL and assembly in early 80s.

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

#170

Post by Closi »

jacquesm wrote: post #59
rabuse wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate on this a bit? Some details would've been useful rather than just a "no u" comment.

It's spot on. This is such a crazy end run around the real issue that it won't solve anything, it replaces COBOL that apparently the people that need this don't understand with Java that they also won't understand because it will be translated from idiomatic COBOL, which has about as much to do with Java as it does with Prolog, Visual Basic or C. You'd need to be an expert in both Java and COBOL to make soup of it.

And presumably this is why it requires an LLM rather than a transcompiler.

You want to translate 'idiomatic COBOL soup' which has been added to over decades into clean structured (possibly OOP) code covered by a robust library of tests.

Post reply on HN