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[DISCUSS] IBM using LLMs to convert COBOL to Java (techcrunch.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 🙏

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Why would you expect ChatGPT to know how to write code in a language that you created yourself? According to that repository you created it last year, and ChatGPT was only trained on data up to 2021 so there's no way it could have been in its training set. Even though AIs have surprised us with their insights in a lot of cases they aren't magical.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Admittedly, I worded my comment poorly. What I meant is that ChatGPT struggled with understanding the semantics and structure of the language.

As an example, try from this this code block

$S__ do
S__-m__w("Hello world!") do

You can, hopefully guess that S__ is a variable which has a method m__w, accessed by using a hyphen, rather than a dot and statements end using a do keyword. ChatGPT missed on all marks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you tried including the docs in the prompt as well? I wouldn't have guessed that S__ is a variable in your example, but I would've known that after reading the docs. I'd expect ChatGPT to at least do OK if it had access to the docs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Huh, fair enough, its hard to know whats obvious and whats not.

As for the second part, to my slight surprise, it did manage to figure it out. I guess I just suck at using LLMs lol

edit: To clarify, previously I tried only to correct its mistakes over and over again untill I got frustated

edit2: I still feel like chatGPT is struggling with basics of the language. maybe its just me being shit at using LLMs but smh