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

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by bahmanm@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] FoxBJK@midwest.social 21 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Converting ancient code to a more modern language seems like a great use for AI, in all honesty. Not a lot of COBOL devs out there but once it's Java the amount of coders available to fix/improve whatever ChatGPT spits out jumps exponentially!

[–] socsa@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm more alarmed at the conversation in this thread about migrating these cobol apps to java. Maybe I am the one who is out of touch, but what the actual fuck? Is it just because of the large java hiring pool? If you are effectively starting from scratch why in the ever loving fuck would you pick java?

[–] NightAuthor@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

Java is the new cobol, all the enterprises love it.

[–] LeylaLove@hexbear.net 2 points 2 years ago

This is what in thinking. Even the few people I know IRL that know COBOL from their starting days say it's a giant pain in the ass as a language. It's not like it's really gonna cost all that much time to do compared to paying labor to rewrite it from the base, even if they don't end up using it. Sure, correcting bad code can take a lot of time to do manually. But important code being in COBOL is a ticking time bomb, they gotta do something.