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morkalork | 6 days ago

Honestly, there's companies that have lost the source code for some of their applications. Or, they depend on components from vendors that have long ceased to exist. I remember there being a lot of consternation around being able to compile and link against binary components that have just been around forever that could never be recompiled themselves. More people "Learning COBOL" was never going to be a solution to that ball and chain. And yeah, LLMs are good in the reverse engineering space too so maybe we'll finally see movement on that in the next decade.

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notepad0x90|6 days ago

You're probably right, no disagreement there. but in the context of my previous comment, the people that write cobol today, I don't think there is a lot of work for them trying to reverse engineer native code back to cobol because the source is lost. But you make a really good point, if AI can assist with lost code recovery, perhaps it will assist them in migrating away from it or getting rid of workarounds and complexities implemented to get that previously opaque binary's behavior.