IBM taps AI to translate COBOL code to Java | TechCrunch
techcrunch.com
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 🙏

  • Juja
    9•10 months ago

    What would your language of choice have been? And why is java horrible for this scenario? it sounds like a reasonably good choice to me

    • @AttackPandaEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      I’m thinking Go or Rust would be the logical next step. They probably won’t want an interpreted language so Python is out.

      • Juja
        1•10 months ago

        Just curious, what about go or rust makes them the logical next choice and not java? What do go or rust do better that java doesn’t?

        • @[email protected]
          1•10 months ago

          Java is an Oracle honey pot, a royal sustainment PIA, massive security liability, clutters up systems with its nonsense and slow as shit.

          “dear diary, despite running on a system with 1TB of RAM, a routine security patch reset the Java max memory quota and now every Java process stops after 256MB of object allocation. All four threads ran out of memory with 999GB RAM free. Thank you for this wonderful and blessed gift of computational ineptitude, amen.”

      • @AttackPandaEnglish
        5•10 months ago

        I’m assuming there is an implied /s here

      • TacoEnglish
        0•10 months ago

        JavaScript is actually really nice as a beginner programming language because of how quickly and visually you can see your results, and how easily you can debug with console output. Yeah it’s horribly unoptimized but it’s not for big things. It’s for little things. It’s baby’s first programming language.

        • @[email protected]
          1•10 months ago

          It actually is pretty quick. Dont sleep on JavaScript capabilities. However, it is untyped. You wouldn’t want the date you wrote your check to become the amount of your check, for example.

          TypeScript does a nice job there but all in all at that point might as well go all in on a typed language.

        • @[email protected]
          1•10 months ago

          What

          Java is a POS and mainframes run faster emulated on a rasberry pi vs the actual hw.

          The real answer is you want a typed language with financial transactions. But even python would be better than Java.