The thing is though, Paradox standards fucking suck

I’d be more critical if Roblox didn’t require ID verification for 18+ accounts. Think it’s fucking hilarious that Roblox dating would already be doing more than most dating apps lol.

Yeah, I don’t think this will be as good as we want. The amount of technical debt I’d expect in these big programs would be off the charts. It would take a full team of people just to feed in corrections, and they would need to both know COBOL and be willing to kill all the COBOL jobs to do it. It’s a tough ask

I’m still optimistic though because it’s IBM and converting between languages is a billion dollar question. I don’t think IBM would do a truly irresponsible deployment of such big corporate changes. I’d expect IBM to do a LOT of testing before sending anything out that would actually change the world, such as banking software. But in could be wrong.

I don’t think the LLM is gonna do that great of a job with it for this reason, but still worth giving a shot. ChatGPT is a well trained coding chimp. You realistically could get a well trained chimp to start off a lot of projects and have people finish it. The fact that it can correct itself after you explain how it’s wrong is very powerful as well.

LLM isn’t gonna be useful for converting a single program from COBOL to Java, it is gonna be useful for converting many programs from COBOL to Java. I bet IBM is trying this on their own shit first before they try to sell it to customers, because language conversion software would be a HUGE but very boom based money.

This is what in thinking. Even the few people I know IRL that know COBOL from their starting days say it’s a giant pain in the ass as a language. It’s not like it’s really gonna cost all that much time to do compared to paying labor to rewrite it from the base, even if they don’t end up using it. Sure, correcting bad code can take a lot of time to do manually. But important code being in COBOL is a ticking time bomb, they gotta do something.