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1. Embed this notice
   pinskia (pinskia@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 07:15:37 JST pinskia

   in reply to

   • Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦
   • Marty Heyman

   @Marty @riotnrrd BY the way LLM and LLVM are different things too :). LLM is large language model that is the AI/ML model that will be used.

   • Embed this notice
     Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦 (riotnrrd@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 07:15:39 JST Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     • Marty Heyman

     @Marty Oh, I did not mean to denigrate COBOL! While I have never written any, I know enough to understand at least the high points of why it’s still around. It’s the conversion by LLM that is the problem. If I’m the owner of a business process, and I’m presented with a bunch of Java code extruded by an LLM, I have no way of validating that output, whether against the original COBOL or against my actual requirements. At least if it’s written by humans, we can talk through it.

   • Embed this notice
     Marty Heyman (marty@symas.social)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 07:15:39 JST Marty Heyman

     in reply to

     • Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦

     @riotnrrd By the way, LLVM being one thing, GCC another, COBOL for GCC is being submitted to GCC for 15 right now. Incomplete but the core language is there.

   • Embed this notice
     Marty Heyman (marty@symas.social)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 07:15:40 JST Marty Heyman

     in reply to

     • Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦

     @riotnrrd ... We could have a discussion about your opinion of COBOL. Your second point is on target. Developers responsibly write and test COBOL to Java translators and carefully make sure the results are correct (#heirloomcomputing among others). AI is a different matter altogether. GnuCOBOL simply compiles it to C and uses gcc to produce native programs. Our COBOL for GCC (gcobol) will be a GCC - native compiler. Recompilation is often all that is needed.

     #cobol #gcobol #gnucobol

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     Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦 (riotnrrd@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 07:15:41 JST Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦

     This idea of using #AI to translate #COBOL code into #Java has one big problem.

     The goal is reasonable: ancient COBOL code is effectively a black box, hard to modify or extend and even harder to debug.

     But who is validating the Java output? A big part of the problem is how difficult it is to understand the business logic that the COBOL was implementing — but all that analysis work is still required to evaluate the correctness of the Java, plus Java debugging!

     https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/22/ibm-taps-ai-to-translate-cobol-code-to-java/