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

61–70 of 186 posts

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

#61

Post by itsoktocry »

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…

>If they haven't actually done it by now, it's a management problem

How could you possibly know that? Do you think businesses have so few problems to deal with that moving off of Cobol should always be the priority, even if it functions and they are managing it?

It's not possible to resolve everything you have to do all at once.

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

#62

Post by rubyfan »

IshKebab wrote: post #53
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'm pretty sure there's already a system to transpile COBOL to Java without resorting to LLMs.

Judging by the branding this is just an attempt to capitalize on the mindshare around LLM and GPT. Recall about 5-8 years ago they tried to sell the notion of huge cost savings replacing humans with the jeopardy champion and tech executives ate it up for a while.

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

#63

Post by Nextgrid »

tw04 wrote: post #4

Plenty of folks know COBOL - the problem is you need to entice someone YOUNG to learn it, which basically means overpaying them. If I'm an 18-year-old why would I focus on learning a programming language that puts me in a job with 0 chance of advancement? Sure I'm irreplaceable to the company, but I've also only got a handful of other places I could go if they treat me poorly or sunset their mainframe.

The problem isn't knowledge of the programming language. The problem is the developer experience not just within the language but the runtime environment it's executed in, as well as the corporate environment where such systems are used.

The developer experience is terrible, it's a completely parallel world that diverged about 25 years ago from what we're used to, and it's not particularly good. Furthermore, it's so obscenely priced that it will be never used for anything new (and forget personal projects), so career-wise it's a dead-end and confines you to only ever work in existing legacy deployments.

The "corporate experience" for the lack of a better word is terrible too. Companies that run this have zero engineering culture (if they did they would've finished their migration off COBOL long ago) and developer positions have about the same amount of respect and political influence as the janitor. There are much better options pretty much anywhere else, so the only remaining people are too mediocre to get those better opportunities, so it's not a good environment to learn from either.

Migrating off COBOL (or any legacy system) is possible - after all, startups have built similar systems from scratch. The problem is that this requires a competent engineering team and you won't get that without a good engineering culture and embracing engineering as one of the key pillars of your business and giving it the resources and respect it deserves.

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

#64

Post by kjs3 »

pixl97 wrote: post #29
kjs3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they worked as effectively as they were touted, they'd have cleared out the cobol.

No really, in fact I'd say the opposite. The issue with COBOL is any old idiot can't write it. If someone is touching the COBOL they are going in and making minor changes/expansions to an application that is older than the average HN user and those changes and expectations are well defined. With Java and/or language of the day your cheapest run of the mill contractor given exceptionally poor instructions will crank o…

I have no idea how that's the opposite of what I said. Transpilers haven't worked not because of how much or little the replacements are paid, or how well they do their job, but because there's more to moving from one computational ecosystem to another than just the language.

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

#65

Post by tobyjsullivan »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #14
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be curious to know how we’re defining “overpaying” here. These companies have effectively accrued 50+ years of technical debt (they could have migrated off COBOL decades ago). Meanwhile, based on my limited experience with these industries, I’d be surprised if they even offer market rates to new hires.

Let me up the ante. Why do we believe COBOL is yech-debt?

If there’s a shortage of developers who understand the language, then the team cannot properly understand the application (as per TFA).

If nobody can understand the application, it cannot be modified.

If an application cannot be modified, its value will continuously decrease with time.

That decrease in value, as well as the projected cost of building a replacement, is tantamount to accruing interest on a debt.

They could have reduced that debt by moving to functionally equivalent but more commonly taught languages back when their team could still understand the system.

It wasn’t necessarily wrong for them to accrue this debt - after all, banks and these monolithic institutions are masters at effectively utilizing debt. However, the practice may have become habitual and it looks like they might be in pretty deep at this point.

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

#66

Post by victor106 »

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…

> Skyla Loomis, IBM’s Vice President of IBM Z Software adds, “But you have to remember that this is a developer assistant tool. It's AI assisted, but it still requires the developer. So yes, the developer is involved with the tooling and helping the customers select the services.” Once the partnership between man and machine is established, the AI steps in and says, ‘Okay, I want to transform this portion of code. The developer may still need to perform some minor editing of the code that the AI provides, Loomis explains. “It might be 80 or 90 percent of what they need, but it still requires a couple of changes. It’s a productivity enhancement—not a developer replacement type of activity.”

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

#67

Post by Nextgrid »

jacquesm wrote: post #56
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.

COBOL is pretty easy to learn. The problem is that it is so full of archaic nonsense (less so with the more recent versions) that you will be tearing your hair out and wishing for something more modern. COBOL's main value is in maintaining a pile of legacy codebases, mostly in fintech and insurance that are so large and so old that rewriting them is an absolute no-go. These attempts at cross compiling are a way to ge…

> that rewriting them is an absolute no-go

Rewriting and expecting 100% feature-parity (and bug-parity, since any bugs/inconsistencies are most likely relied upon by now) is realistically impossible.

However, new banking/insurance startups proved you can build this stuff from scratch using modern tooling, so the migration path would be to create your own "competitor" and then move your customers onto it.

The problem I see is that companies that still run these legacy systems also have a legacy culture fundamentally incompatible with what's needed to build and retain a competent engineering team. Hell, there's probably also a lot of deadweight whose jobs are to make up for the shortcomings of the legacy system and who'd have every incentive to sabotage the migration/rebuild project.

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

#68

Post by credit_guy »

rubyfan wrote: post #58
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…

> 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…

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

There are no absolute "management problems". Something that is a management problem when the effort required is 1000 man-years, may stop being so when it's only 100 man-days.

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

#69

Post by trealira »

pixl97 wrote: post #26
nobodyandproud wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me up the ante. Why do we believe COBOL is yech-debt?

Hell, after seeing both kind of applications (java vs cobol) by these bank/financial companies I am of the opposite mind. Those COBOL applications will keep working until the sun burns up or inflation makes the numbers so long they no longer fit in bounds. The java applications they write should fill you with terror.

Why do you say the Java applications at banks and financial institutions so bad? I'm not trying to contradict you or say you're wrong; I just want to know why.

Not having ever seen this kind of software, I would assume that the existing COBOL applications are good simply because all the bad COBOL code was probably scrapped decades ago, an example of survivorship bias.

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

#70

Post by exhilaration »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #8
tw04 wrote: post #4

Plenty of folks know COBOL - the problem is you need to entice someone YOUNG to learn it, which basically means overpaying them. If I'm an 18-year-old why would I focus on learning a programming language that puts me in a job with 0 chance of advancement? Sure I'm irreplaceable to the company, but I've also only got a handful of other places I could go if they treat me poorly or sunset their mainframe.

I’d be curious to know how we’re defining “overpaying” here. These companies have effectively accrued 50+ years of technical debt (they could have migrated off COBOL decades ago). Meanwhile, based on my limited experience with these industries, I’d be surprised if they even offer market rates to new hires.

The answer is India. Just Google India and COBOL, there's tons of schools teaching it. So if Watson doesn't work out for you, IBM is happy to sell you offshore consulting services the bridge the gap! This is all win-win for IBM -- you can can keep your $200 million mainframe service contract or hire IBM to (kinda? maybe?) move you to something more modern.
Post reply on HN