"Morgan Stanley, he said, was able to train the tool on its own code base, including languages that are no longer, or never were, in widespread use. Now the company’s roughly 15,000 developers, based around the world, can use it for a range of tasks including translating legacy code into plain English specs, isolating sections of existing code for regulatory enquiries and other asks, and even fully translating smaller sections of legacy code into modern code.
But when it comes to full translation, the technology still has some room to mature, he said. It can technically rewrite code from an old language like Perl in a new one like Python, but it wouldn’t necessarily know how to write it as efficient code that takes advantage of all Python’s capabilities, he said. And that’s one big reason humans are staying in the loop, he said.
Where the tool really shines is in translating legacy code into English specs, basically a map of what the code does, according to Pizzi. It’s something an ever dwindling pool of developers, trained on super-old or specific coding languages, knows how to do. With those specs, any developer can then write the old code as new code in a modern programming language, he said."
Bostonian•8mo ago
https://archive.is/p08Lf
"Morgan Stanley, he said, was able to train the tool on its own code base, including languages that are no longer, or never were, in widespread use. Now the company’s roughly 15,000 developers, based around the world, can use it for a range of tasks including translating legacy code into plain English specs, isolating sections of existing code for regulatory enquiries and other asks, and even fully translating smaller sections of legacy code into modern code.
But when it comes to full translation, the technology still has some room to mature, he said. It can technically rewrite code from an old language like Perl in a new one like Python, but it wouldn’t necessarily know how to write it as efficient code that takes advantage of all Python’s capabilities, he said. And that’s one big reason humans are staying in the loop, he said.
Where the tool really shines is in translating legacy code into English specs, basically a map of what the code does, according to Pizzi. It’s something an ever dwindling pool of developers, trained on super-old or specific coding languages, knows how to do. With those specs, any developer can then write the old code as new code in a modern programming language, he said."