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

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

#41

Post by lozenge »

ufmace wrote: post #21

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 P…

Like in the video.. they are interpreting the COBOL and Java code with enough test cases and comparing their behaviour.

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

#42

Post by rightbyte »

mlhpdx wrote: post #18
discmonkey wrote: post #3

Classic misunderstanding of programming languages. The only thing stopping cobol from being "known" is these companies paying for it.

It’s more than that. If you spend a couple or more years learning to maintain those systems, where else will you work? Will you find a co-founder or investor for a COBOL based system when you go “entrepreneur”? Maybe, but it better be a damn strong niche. Not moving forward with the software industry is a weird kind of conceit that separates these companies from the mainstream by far more than money.

It still comes down to paying enough money for someone to do it. Pay me twice what I make now and I'll switch to coding absurd legacy all-caps COBOL systems in a heart beat. Probably less then that too.

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

#43

Post by serallak »

mlhpdx wrote: post #18
discmonkey wrote: post #3

Classic misunderstanding of programming languages. The only thing stopping cobol from being "known" is these companies paying for it.

It’s more than that. If you spend a couple or more years learning to maintain those systems, where else will you work? Will you find a co-founder or investor for a COBOL based system when you go “entrepreneur”? Maybe, but it better be a damn strong niche. Not moving forward with the software industry is a weird kind of conceit that separates these companies from the mainstream by far more than money.

I don't think it'd take two years to learn cobol, it should be less than that.

But it will take much more than that to learn the gnarly codebase in use in those shops...

And that is a skill that is certainly not transferable.

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

#44

Post by vbezhenar »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #25
ufmace wrote: post #21

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 P…

How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.

Language is easy, spaghetti code written without any discipline 60 years ago and modified in haste since is hard.

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

#45

Post by SoftTalker »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #25
ufmace wrote: post #21

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 P…

How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.

Not hard. It's a bit old-fashioned and sort of verbose but it's nothing difficult especially if you already know any other imperative languages. My first job out of school in the early 1990s was with one of the "big" consulting firms. We learned COBOL in a four-week boot camp and were then dispatched to a client site to write code.

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

#46

Post by briHass »

the_only_law wrote: post #27
matthewdgreen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.

Learning COBOL is the easy part. My understanding is the hard part is becoming familiar with insanely expensive, proprietary mainframe platform that’s you’ll find in most COBOL work. I know IBM has some sort of self training material, but I’m not sure if it’s enough to go from zero to qualified. Most work I see in the area seems to want established domain experts, not hackers who learn just enough to be dangerous.

Not really much different from today: sure, you can 'learn' a new language in a few days, but you won't know the build tooling, deployment strategies, environment specifics, convention over config, and typical patterns/practices that will allow others to understand what you wrote.

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

#47

Post by gopher_space »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #10

The flawed "economic analysis" in this article is so commonly brought out, but at this point we should just call it what it is: lying. There is no "shortage of COBOL programmers." Businesses are simply choosing what they will pay, and the market is responding appropriately. And this is also not just a case of naively shouting "duh, just pay them more" for a market that can't bear the increase in costs (i.e. some indu…

I cut my teeth on financial COBOL back in the 90s and from my perspective the article isn't "lying", it's "completely divorced from reality". For the past three decades it's been cheaper to encapsulate these systems and extend functionality by working in a modern language, and so that's what everyone's been doing.

The prime issue (imho) is that it's less expensive and better for everyone if you rewrite these systems from scratch, but that cost is still so prohibitive that it might not make sense to keep operating the company.

The second issue is hardware availability, a bizarre omission on the author's part. Your org lifespan might entirely, predictably depend on how many spares a forward-thinking dev bought in the 70's.

The third issue is fintech. Someone else has already raised the cash needed to rewrite from scratch, and what you can do about it is sell them your client list.

From a personal perspective COBOL is such a pain in the ass to work with that I'd need a ruinous salary to be enthusiastic about the job.

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

#48

Post by apstats »

high_5 wrote: post #38
apstats wrote: post #34

I feel like this solution was written by someone who hasn’t built software before. Doing a rewrite for the sake of a rewrite is not a good idea.

So... Having no COBOL devs left is a better one? What's the alternative then?

Yes - if we need them to people can learn COBOL it's not any harder to learn than many other programming languages.

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

#49

Post by drewcoo »

ufmace wrote: post #21

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 P…

> 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.

Is the goal to get working systems or to generate support activity? Or to tank the systems and replace them?

> it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that

What if we replace middle managers with LLMs?

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