The true sign of a junior developer is they want to rewrite what they don’t understand instead of actually understanding why the system is the way it is or how it works
What am I saying, they aren’t going to rewrite it, they’re going to have AI do it 🙄
Vibe coding all the way
That’s what I’m assuming they will try first, because of course this set of teenagers would probably do that.
AI that was trained by programmers that don’t understand the source code either.
Has AI even been trained on COBOL?
They’ll just feed it the language spec. It’ll be fine. Unless they try to run the result of course.
You could fit so many backdoor into this baby!
More insights from people that actually know a thing or two (not s00perl33t teenagers, obviously):
Boingboing has taken a downturn in recent years IMHO (at least their comment section surely did - but now that they are hidden behind a paywall, I no longer see the comments, so maybe they are on the upswing again… :) ). Anyway, they had a good analogy of the Chesteron’s Fence:
“There exists … let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
– Chesterton, G. K. (1929) in The Thing
The Slashdot comments are pretty illustrative, I think.
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/03/28/2148205/doge-to-rewrite-ssa-codebase-in-months
