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 🙏
Yeah, I read the article.
They’re MASSIVELY handwaving a lot of detail away. Moreover, they’re taking the “we’ll fix it in post” approach by suggesting “we can just run an armful of security analysis software on the code after the system spits something out”. While that’s a great sentiment, you (and everyone considering this approach) needs to consider that complex systems are pretty much NEVER perfect. There WILL be misses. Add this to the fact that a ton of organizations that still use COBOL are banks - which are generally considered fairly critical to the day-to-day operation of our society, and you can see why I am incredibly skeptical of this whole line of thinking.
I’m sure the IBM engineers who made the thing are extremely good at what they do, but at the same time, I have a lot less faith in the organizations that will actually employ the system. In fact, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked to find that banks would assign an inappropriately junior engineer to the task - perhaps even an intern - because “it’s as simple as invoking a processing pipeline”. This puts a truly hilarious amount of trust into what’s effectively a black box.
Additionally, for a good engineer, learning any given programming language isn’t actually that hard. And if these transition efforts are done in what I would consider to be the right way, you’d also have a team of engineers who know both the input and output languages such that they can go over (at the very, very least) critical and logically complex areas of the code to ensure accuracy. But since this is all about saving money, I’d bet that step simply won’t be done.
For those who have never worked on legacy systems. Any one who suggests “we’ll fix it in post” is asking you to do something that just CANNOT happen.
The systems I code for, if something breaks, we’re going to court over it. Not, oh no let’s patch it real quick, it’s your ass is going to be cross examined on why the eff your system just wrote thousands of legal contracts that cannot be upheld as valid.
Yeah, that fix it in post shit any article, especially this one that’s linked, suggests should be considered trash that has no remote idea how deep in shit one can be if you start getting wild hairs up your ass for changing out parts of a critical system.
And that’s precisely the point I’m making. The systems we’re talking about here are almost exclusively banking systems. If you don’t think there will be so Fucking Huge Lawsuits over any and all serious bugs introduced by this - and there will be bugs introduced by this - you straight up do not understand what it’s like to develop software for mission-critical applications.
Trusting IBM engineers, perhaps…sales/marketing? Oooh now I am skeptical.