4 ms·

The idea of automagic conversion of legacy code is great and the market is huge. But then Watson failed to deliver in the past and I doubt that this time it wil

The idea of automagic conversion of legacy code is great and the market is huge. But then Watson failed to deliver in the past and I doubt that this time it will live up to its claim.

Tokelin 6y ago
Do you have any links on the past failures? I of course heard some of the attempts, but not the failures.
- mikequinlan 6y ago
  "How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care" https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/how-ibm-watson-overpromised-and-underdelivered-on-ai-health-care https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/how-ibm-wat...
hinkley 6y ago
I was expecting to have a few more years yet before AI beat a Go grandmaster, but that ship already sailed. For Watson to be able to convert code, it's going to have to be able to determine the intention of each block of code, and know how to translate those intention into the new code. You will, of course, end up with "You can write Fortran in any language" output, but if they do manage to succeed, then this will be the first time in my career that I've ever been remotely worried about the prospect of computers taking over the job of programming. In all likelihood however, it'll turn the process of creating software into a conversation, not unlike the negotiations between a builder, the customer, and the architect. Honestly though, if we'd have ever cracked the modularity problem, we'd just be loading this old code as opaque blobs, possibly through a cross-compiler. But we never succeeded, and over a time span of decades, lots of coding conventions start to resemble premature optimization, making it painful for modern eyes to look at this old code. In fact the latter may be the stumbling block for automated translation. If the old code wasn't so 'quirky' (read: byzantine as hell) we would have ported it already.
- nullsense 6y ago
  I don't know about IBM but Microsoft could probably do it now they own GitHub.
bigbubba 6y ago
'Watson' is just a brand that IBM uses for a variety of unrelated bullshit.
WalterBright 6y ago
The trouble with machine conversion is the machine cannot know which edge cases and quirks the code relies on, and which it does not. For example, if translating C, does the program rely on two globals sitting next to each other in memory? (Yes, this happens, I did it myself earlier in my career.) I've done many translations of large programs from one language to another. This includes two large assembler programs that I didn't write into nice, clean C. I don't see any way a machine could determine what effects were important and what weren't.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  BTW, I found out my program relied on two globals being next to each other when I translated it to another language and it didn't work :-)
prepend 6y ago
I think it will work just like the other Watson projects- people offshore manually working and pretending to be AI. I don’t think I would ever hire IBM consulting to convert my COBOL to Java, so not sure Watson could do it any better than IBM professional services.

The idea of automagic conversion of legacy code is great and the market is huge. But then Watson failed to deliver in the past and I doubt that this time it will live up to its claim.

Tokelin 6y ago

Do you have any links on the past failures? I of course heard some of the attempts, but not the failures.

mikequinlan 6y ago
"How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care" https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/how-ibm-watson-overpromised-and-underdelivered-on-ai-health-care https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/how-ibm-wat...

hinkley 6y ago

I was expecting to have a few more years yet before AI beat a Go grandmaster, but that ship already sailed. For Watson to be able to convert code, it's going to have to be able to determine the intention of each block of code, and know how to translate those intention into the new code. You will, of course, end up with "You can write Fortran in any language" output, but if they do manage to succeed, then this will be the first time in my career that I've ever been remotely worried about the prospect of computers taking over the job of programming. In all likelihood however, it'll turn the process of creating software into a conversation, not unlike the negotiations between a builder, the customer, and the architect. Honestly though, if we'd have ever cracked the modularity problem, we'd just be loading this old code as opaque blobs, possibly through a cross-compiler. But we never succeeded, and over a time span of decades, lots of coding conventions start to resemble premature optimization, making it painful for modern eyes to look at this old code. In fact the latter may be the stumbling block for automated translation. If the old code wasn't so 'quirky' (read: byzantine as hell) we would have ported it already.

nullsense 6y ago
I don't know about IBM but Microsoft could probably do it now they own GitHub.

bigbubba 6y ago

'Watson' is just a brand that IBM uses for a variety of unrelated bullshit.

WalterBright 6y ago

The trouble with machine conversion is the machine cannot know which edge cases and quirks the code relies on, and which it does not. For example, if translating C, does the program rely on two globals sitting next to each other in memory? (Yes, this happens, I did it myself earlier in my career.) I've done many translations of large programs from one language to another. This includes two large assembler programs that I didn't write into nice, clean C. I don't see any way a machine could determine what effects were important and what weren't.

WalterBright 6y ago
BTW, I found out my program relied on two globals being next to each other when I translated it to another language and it didn't work :-)

prepend 6y ago

I think it will work just like the other Watson projects- people offshore manually working and pretending to be AI. I don’t think I would ever hire IBM consulting to convert my COBOL to Java, so not sure Watson could do it any better than IBM professional services.