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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

#71

Post by nobodyandproud »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #65
nobodyandproud wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Many systems are obscure or niche, but that isn’t tech debt.

What you’re describing is a management and leadership failure.

In US tech we have an overabundance of Type A people in it for the money, but there are plenty of smart Type Bs who just want stability and a life, for a fraction of the going SV engineering pay.

You have to wonder why the latter is impossible for American companies to achieve.

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

#72

Post by JackFr »

vbezhenar wrote: post #44
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.

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

That is not any COBOL I’ve seen. Straightforward, well documented and comprehensively specified and tested.

When we needed changes (this was back office clearing stuff for a bank) they wouldn’t even talk to us until we specced out the changes we wanted in writing and often the specs we submitted would come back with requests for clarification. This was like the opposite of agile, but I don’t recall any bugs or defects making it into production.

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

#73

Post by hnbear »

Having had to support and migrate COBOL in a big financial the problems weren’t really related to the COBOL, but instead were:

1. The mainframe costs and support. These can be mitigated with migration to a platform like Microfocus to emulate it, but be careful you don’t replace your ultra reliable mainframe with some flakey Windows servers.

2. The embedded business logic. Within the 50-60 years of code there’s a ton a specific edge cases encoded for long forgotten business reasons. These make rewrites really hard as bugs and edge cases have long since become features or behaviors dependent apps are coded to rely on. It takes a ton of extra analysis work to understand what to keep and what to trash.

3. The cobol apps run in a challenging environment that’s also not well understood today. All the jobs in JCL, ISPF to manage things, and a system like CICS for input/output. It’s a huge change beyond just writing code in a regular IDE.

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

#74

Post by koenigdavidmj »

victor106 wrote: post #66
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. Th…

That seems to be the spot humans are weakest at—reviewing something where we think the computer did a good job 90% of the time, but quickly noticing when something goes wrong. Similar to level 3 self-driving—requiring full attention, able to instantly snap into full unassisted driving.

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

#75

Post by jacquesm »

Nextgrid wrote: post #67
jacquesm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 suspect that the only thing that will cure this is for technology to stop being such a moving target. Once we reach that level we can maybe finally call it engineering, accept some responsibility (and liability) and professionalize. Until then this is how it will be.

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

#76

Post by exhilaration »

serallak wrote: post #43
mlhpdx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

There's a comment in this thread from a former consultant that completed a 4 week COBOL bootcamp before being sent to a client to write code!

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

victor106 wrote: post #66
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. Th…

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by uxp8u61q »

pixl97 wrote: post #23
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 seen some currently used COBOL that had it's like change date in the early 80s in the finance industry, so there some rather ancient programs out there. Of course this also means that these files have met the needs of the industry that long and bug free so why go messing with things that move 100s of millions/billions of dollars per day.

Even if it's not handling billions of dollars a day... Why fix what isn't broken? Software isn't an end into itself, it's a tool to solve a business need. If the business need is met, there's not anything to fix.

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #74
victor106 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Th…

That seems to be the spot humans are weakest at—reviewing something where we think the computer did a good job 90% of the time, but quickly noticing when something goes wrong. Similar to level 3 self-driving—requiring full attention, able to instantly snap into full unassisted driving.

[deleted]
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