COBOL gets new life in the cloud thanks to Watsonx and AI

https://www.silverliningsinfo.com/apps-services/ibm-watsonx-brings-cobol-cloud-era-ai

by rmason • 3 years ago

41 45 3 years ago

rmason• 3 years ago

Appears that the first programmers being replaced by AI will be Cobol developers as they have gotten too expensive due to their rarity.

tapland• 3 years ago

The language isn't hard, getting new devs that stay 15+ years to learn the ins and outs of systems that large is.

We're making a push to get our cobol devs some kind of bonus foe sticking around because we can hire a ton of junior devs but after a few years only the ones nearing retirement are left.

worthless-trash• 3 years ago

Can you talk more on this, as an older developer most of the cobol jobs that I have seen end up being underpaid for this stage in my life.

What kind of 'ins and outs' are in this context ?

LapsangGuzzler2• 3 years ago

I’d love to see AI take on some of these 50 year old COBOL monstrosities, partly because it’s desperately needed but also because I have little faith that AI is anywhere near sophisticated enough to undo half a century of bad programming decisions without going sideways.

troupo• 3 years ago

undo half a century of bad programming decisions without going sideways.

I'd like to see AI manage to figure out 50 years of law and regulation changes and corner cases that have no documentation other than COBOL implementations.

Bostonian• 3 years ago

Searching "COBOL" by date yields many threads about Watsonx, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37223440 .

layer8• 3 years ago

Surprising that you had to do that search to find your own submission.

xwdv3• 3 years ago

I learned COBOL only to find the real reason the engineers get paid so much to maintain systems is not really due to their rarity but rather their extensive decades of experience which I will never really have.

A lot of new COBOL work just gets shipped off to India to be done cheaply.

akokanka• 3 years ago

It's not just Cobol that gets moved to India almost all dev is being moved there. When you get decent Devs for 45 buck's a day, there's no need in others.

michaelmrose4• 3 years ago

This is mathematically untrue as ought to be obvious by the mere fact that other devs exist. There are more work needing good devs than good devs in the world let alone just India thus even expensive labor finds a market.

declan_roberts• 3 years ago

Any “decent” dev in India will simply take the H1B train to America if they’re being paid $45 a day.

LapsangGuzzler2• 3 years ago

Yep, average COBOL salaries don’t touch modern SWE salaries. The crazy money is limited to a few expert consultants as you point out.

A lot of new COBOL work just gets shipped off to India to be done cheaply.

This is becoming less true for the reason I mentioned above: the pay is much higher for modern languages and tools, which means that the big Indian contracting firms are now training Java/AWS platform devs instead of COBOL. This is creating a growing shortage of COBOL talent that is beginning to impact onshore COBOL dev shops.

xvilka• 3 years ago

See also a post about OCamlPro experience on migrating some COBOL projects to use GnuCOBOL[1].

[1] https://ocamlpro.com/blog/2023_03_18_autofonce/

beej71• 3 years ago

I'm a little surprised that AI is the best way to approach this, as opposed to some kind of transpiler. I'd be more inclined to trust the latter for correctness.

b800h4• 3 years ago

The transpilers I've seen have created some extraordinary Java. If you've experience of the COBOL "Data Division", imagine how that gets ported across to an object oriented language..

But I still agree with you. I've experience of a couple of COBOL migration projects, and I wouldn't want AI anywhere near it. The testing required is insane enough as it is, and the once-a-decade corner cases numerous enough for the idea of using AI on this to scare the bejeesus out of me.

This is code that can still contain for-loops to slow down processing so the teleprinters can keep up...

winternewt• 3 years ago

Well if nothing else, the AI could help you write more unit tests.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

As side note, modern versions of ISO COBOL also supports OOP.

sgt1013• 3 years ago

Interestingly if I were using AI to do this the place I would focus is testing. Coding assistants seem to be very good at generating run-of-the-mill testing, which would free up testers to focus on the once in a decade stuff.

belter• 3 years ago

You can also keep doing COBOL but compile for Java bytecode and run directly in the JVM

"Why Move to JVM COBOL Code?" - https://www.microfocus.com/documentation/visual-cobol/vc60/D...

sgt1013• 3 years ago

You can quite easily get GenAI to rewrite some code blocks from Cobol to Java. The issue is getting it to do it at scale and reliably.

I think it's possible, but I think it's a 10 year research path.

IBM will get folks to buy into this and then incrementally refine it for about 5 years. At that point they will start lagging the state of the art because they will stop investing. In about 10 years there will be various tools available from many vendors or opensource that will significantly automate it and we will call it solved.

In reality there will be some niche jobs for folks to use the tools, and those folks will both work hard and get paid well.

tyingq• 3 years ago

Though many COBOL programs have large important bits that aren't in the code at all. Things like JCL, various batch schedulers, facilities like RACF, etc, can mean that porting the code only gets you part of the application.

0x445442• 3 years ago

This dove tails with the Programming as Theory thread; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37263121.

Even if the AI delivered on the task of converting the text from COBOL to Java, it’s not going to preserve the theory.

YeGoblynQueenne• 3 years ago

This is going to end in tears - of laughter or despair, I cannot predict.

But tears nonetheless. COBOL code has typically gone through decades of bug-fixing and maintainance and is of industrial strength, just like the mainframe platforms it runs on, with reliability and uptimes that are insane compared to distributed, server-based systems. Replacing all that with java to run on servers is already a losing proposition. There's no way that Java on servers can reach the same reliability as COBOL on mainframes, even given some kind of perfect translation or transliteration between the two. Now, COBOL translated to Java by "AI", whatever that means for Watsonx (I think it means by "foundation models") is just asking for trouble.

Trouble, note well, that translates to many millions of hard $$$ lost.

This is going to end in tears.

theodpHN• 3 years ago

"IBM on Tuesday announced generative AI tools to help address that problem, modernizing antique mainframe software for the cloud by refactoring COBOL code to Java."

Anyone else thinking, "Now they have two problems"? :-)

COBOL gets new life in the cloud thanks to Watsonx and AI

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