• open_world
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    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@lemmy.world
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      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@beehaw.org
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        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@lemmy.world
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          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@lemmy.ca
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            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
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      1 year ago

      My state’s unemployment system is still COBOL. They did not have a fun time in 2020.