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Comment by allusernamesare | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, it'd be super cool to solve the talent shortage in the field, also Cobol code isn't very pleasant to write.

On the other, I'm not sure I'd want tools known for poor code quality, and hallucinations, to write these super critical systems.

Guess there might be a copilotesque productivity booster for human developers, but I think these systems are some of the last places I'd want LLMs to contribute.

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I wonder if a better goal would be valid translation of the COBOL into X language. Obviously that has its own can of worms but it seems like our goal generally should be getting critical systems to more modern languages that can be maintained more easily.

In 2009, 4 million lines of COBOL were migrated to Java using an automatic translator.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2009/07/cobol-to-java/

The problem is not translation - once it is ported to Java, who will maintain it? It has no specs, no tests, and it’s a spaghetti mess. Is any weirdness a bug or a feature? Nobody knows. Least of all the body-rental remote devs you hired to maintain it.

which is worse than the same situation, but in COBOL, how exactly?

Because you have the same mess plus all the mess and hard to debug incompatibilities and weirdness, added by the translator.

What people don’t get about cobol is that it is a language you can learn in a few days. It is meant to be readable for non-technical users so Cobol itself is not the issue. Once you get past the meaning of sections, and the implicit defaults that are different from modern programming languages, it is way easier than, say, C.

Also, COBOL is basically a special purpose language...It's designed for accounting apps. and reports.

Its really not bad for them either. Verbose, but not bad...

Thanks for sharing! Will need to dig into this

That would remove some portion of the human coders, too.

Why do people always add this "blah blah hallucinations and critical systems"? 1. People write bad and buggy code. 2. You act like we're just blindly throwing untested code at production systems from LLMs.

It's just intellectually dishonest to talk this way.

They will still be helpful but we obviously need to test before we add code into systems. It goes without saying.

Look, we can't all just be realistic about a thing that's going to take our jobs, so we have to lean on tired old excuses instead. Instead of being reasonable, why don't you pick a team - for or against, and then fight about it on Internet forums because, well, what else are you going to do while the build compiles? Look at cat videos?

I generate my own custom cat videos with AI now tyvm.

> It's just intellectually dishonest to talk this way.

> They will still be helpful but we obviously need to test before we add code into systems. It goes without saying.

It's not intellectually dishonest at all. It's an issue of conditioning. There's a class of developers that blindly copy and paste code from StackOverflow or the first hit on Google. They're the same class that will uncritically copy and paste ChatGPT answers.

ChatGPT is worse than SO because it's adaptive. If someone pastes in a SO answer and it doesn't immediately work the developer has to at least engage with the code. ChatGPT can be asked to refine its hallucination until it parses/compiles.

The class of developer blindly copying and pasting answers will not have the expertise to spot hallucinations or likely even fix the inevitable bugs they introduce. Additionally ChatGPT by its nature elides the source of its answers. At the very least a SO answer has some provenance. Not only the poster but some social signally through votes that the answer is legitimate.

ChatGPT answers don't have any of that. It will also happily hallucinate references.

Conditioning junior developers and learners to rely on and trust AI coding is setting them up to fail. It's also going to stunt their growth as developers because they'll never gain any domain knowledge. In the meantime they'll be unknowingly sabotaging products with legit looking but broken code.

I should be worried that the very worst developers might paste bad code from ChatGPT and that's why it's dangerous? Looks an awful lot like mental gymnastics to me.

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