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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] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

As I stated on a different comment in this thread, I worded my comment poorly. Why I think this is relevant however that, at least in this case, if an LLM get code which is significantly different from what its trained with, it can make wildly incorrect guesses. While here its because of a language with a... unique syntax, I think this could also be the case for code with a lot of technical debt or weird design decisions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I don't think this will be as good as we want. The amount of technical debt I'd expect in these big programs would be off the charts. It would take a full team of people just to feed in corrections, and they would need to both know COBOL and be willing to kill all the COBOL jobs to do it. It's a tough ask

I'm still optimistic though because it's IBM and converting between languages is a billion dollar question. I don't think IBM would do a truly irresponsible deployment of such big corporate changes. I'd expect IBM to do a LOT of testing before sending anything out that would actually change the world, such as banking software. But in could be wrong.