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 🙏

  • @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.”