• Rookeh@startrek.website
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    17 hours ago

    I have witnessed companies make this exact mistake before - they have a legacy system written in $LanguageA that they either cannot find developers to maintain, believe is badly written, or does not support some new feature they want to implement (or some combination of the three) - and decide to solve this by taking the existing codebase and porting/transpiling it to $LanguageB (which is more modern, performant, is easy to hire developers for, etc) - without actually rewriting or rearchitecting anything.

    What they are actually doing is substituting one kind of tech debt for another. The existing code that was poorly written and/or not well understood is now just bad code written in a different language. Fixing bugs or implementing new features now takes just as long, if not longer to account for the idiosyncrasies of how the code was ported.

    And now this is being done by AI with even less oversight than usual? Recipe for a maintenance disaster.

    • MoonMelon@lemmy.ml
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      8 hours ago

      Yeah, I’m old enough to remember this song and dance with Java. Also this isn’t like deciding all your javascript should be coffescript. Rust has some pretty big differences. It would be hilarious if the AI just threw a huge unsafe around giant blocks of code.