IBM taps AI to translate COBOL code to Java | TechCrunch
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IBM's new product offering, Code Assistant for IBM Z, leverages a generative AI model to translate COBOL code to Java.

It’s not the 1st time a language/tool will be lost to the annals of the job market, eg VB6 or FoxPro. Though previously all such cases used to happen gradually, giving most people enough time to adapt to the changes.

I wonder what’s it going to be like this time now that the machine, w/ the help of humans of course, can accomplish an otherwise multi-month risky corporate project much faster? What happens to all those COBOL developer jobs?

Pray share your thoughts, esp if you’re a COBOL professional and have more context around the implication of this announcement 🙏

  • eyy@lemm.ee
    35·
    1 year ago

    Not a cobol professional but i know companies that have tried (and failed) to migrate from cobol to java because of the enormously high stakes involved (usually financial).

    LLMs can speed up the process, but ultimately nobody is going to just say “yes, let’s accept all suggested changes the LLM makes”. The risk appetite of companies won’t change because of LLMs.

    • Kache@lemm.ee
      9·
      1 year ago

      Wonder what makes it so difficult. “Cobol to Java” doesn’t sound like an impossible task since transpilers exist. Maybe they can’t get similar performance characteristics in the auto-transpiled code?

      • qaz@lemmy.world
        16·
        1 year ago

        COBOL programs are structured very differently from Java. For example; you can’t just declare a variable, you have to add it to the working storage section at the top of the program.

        • Kache@lemm.ee
          5·
          1 year ago

          That example doesn’t sound particularly difficult. I’m not saying it’d be trivial, but it should be approximately as difficult as writing a compiler. Seems like the real problem is not a technical one.

          • eyy@lemm.ee
            5·
            1 year ago

            It’s never been a technical reason, it’s the fact that most systems still running on COBOL are live, can’t be easily paused, and there’s an extremely high risk of enormous consequences for failure. Banks are a great example of this - hundreds of thousands of transactions per hour (or more), you can’t easily create a backup because even while you’re backing up more business logic and more records are being created, you can’t just tell people “hey we’re shutting off our system for 2 months, come back and get your money later”, and if you fuck up during the migration and rectify it within in hour, you would have caused hundreds/thousands of people to lose some money, and god forbid there was one unlucky SOB who tried to transfer their life savings during that one hour.

            And don’t forget the testing that needs to be done - you can’t even have an undeclared variable that somehow causes an overflow error when a user with a specific attribute deposits a specific amount of money in a specific branch code when Venus and Mars are aligned on a Tuesday.

              • eyy@lemm.ee
                2·
                1 year ago

                Most cobol systems have more code that doesn’t do anything vs code that actually does something.

                What values do variables ROBERT1, ROBERT2 and ROBERT3 hold? Whatever ROBERT wanted.

                And when that system is storing high-risk and/or sensitive data, do you really want to be the person who deletes code that you think “actually does nothing”, only to find out it somehow stopped another portion of code from breaking?

                The reason why these things still exist is business laziness. They don’t know and don’t care what cobol is or isn’t doing.

                That’s the thing - tor a risk-averse industry (most companies running COBOL systems belong here), being the guy who architected the move away from COBOL is a high-risk, high-stress job with little immediate rewards. At best, the move goes seamlessly, and management knows you as “the guy who updated our OS or something and saved us some money but took a few years to do it, while Bob updated our HR system and saved a bunch of money in 1 year”. At worst, you accidentally break something, and now you have a fiasco on your hands.