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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

The increase in complexity of tax law coincided with the era of COBOL mainframes and those changes were a lot easier to implement incrementally, but to build it from scratch now is a herculean task regardless of the language.

AI definitely won’t help with that.

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AI is GREAT at porting software to new languages. That's like one of the things it is best at.

AI is okay at it.

It is one of the things they are best at.

Tho it works best with small chunks of well isolated code… I doubt it’d be very successful with the IRS’s ball of COBOL, especially considering how little cobol code is available for training sets.

It’d still require a ton of hairy manual work.

> IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/22/ibm_says_genai_can_co...

Also from that article

> IBM is giving its mainframe customers a tool infused with generative AI to translate COBOL code to Java

Hard to wholesale believe claims when they are literally the ones selling that capability.

It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.

there's https://www.codeconvert.ai/cobol-to-python-converter if you prefer python

> It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.

All well and good, but the system deals with money. You cannot have rounding issues. For non COBOL systems, rounding issues are a big issue.

Not that Java is dead but that is reminiscent of the futurama professor invention of translating one dead language into another.

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