- open_world ( @open_world@lemmy.ml ) English8•1 year ago
You know, I’ve always read that COBOL projects still get maintained to this day because the costs of rewriting these projects just are too high. I wonder if there’s a cutoff point where maintaining them starts costing more than the rewrite. I just don’t see how organizations can justify maintaining these projects without these kind of changes forever.
- TAG ( @TAG@lemmy.world ) English3•1 year ago
Mission critical code. There are decades of bug fixes. The biggest cost of rewriting it is a risk of errors in the logic.
- darkfiremp3 ( @darkfiremp3@beehaw.org ) English1•1 year ago
I can understand that, the fear of moving and the logic being ruined. I wonder how much modern frameworks could cut down the codebase though
- TAG ( @TAG@lemmy.world ) English1•1 year ago
Modern frameworks don’t help with business logic corner cases. You would want to carefully analyze the algorithms of the legacy code and rewrite same logic in a new language. Even then, the same logic operators don’t work the same in every language (automatic type conversions, truthiness of non-boolean types).
- shadowolf ( @shadowolf@lemmy.ca ) English1•1 year ago
Outside of looking a Cobol once or twice I have almost zero working knowledge of the language. But still this feels like something a transpiler could handle. Or maybe a next gen LLM if direct translation of the source isn’t desirable but just the core logic
- Nutcake ( @Nutcake@lemmy.ml ) English1•1 year ago
My state’s unemployment system is still COBOL. They did not have a fun time in 2020.
- G59 ( @G59@lemmy.ml ) English5•1 year ago
Now that’s some job security
- bagfatnick ( @bagfatnick@kulupu.duckdns.org ) English1•1 year ago
After all, mum makes the best spaghetti.
- JustBrian7872 ( @JustBrian7872@feddit.de ) English1•1 year ago
Inheritance: The good, the bad and the ugly - aka
extends
, “here is the code, my child” andprototype