[temporarely]

Back in late 80s we were building automated Fortran to C converters. Client was in the aerospace field.

> What is the value if is done automatically, nobody learns anything and the code is just a transcript of the old one?

You may be shocked to learn that businesses using software have a different metric for the value of "code" than educating their (transient) code wranglers. The actual value of software is computational work. If a new language affords better tooling and availability of human resources, that is a win.

[Closi]

Yes, I was at a company that moved an application from Cobol to Java for exactly that purpose - having a mission critical application written in cobol is way harder to maintain than having that exact same application in Java.

[codr7]

Extremely short term, yes.

In the longer perspective, you'll lose most good developers if you don't allow them to evolve and have some fun along the way. And without the developers, the source code is pretty much useless.

Humans are not machines.

[refulgentis]

I think this is an interesting line of argument but its sort of reached its shallow depth on its 3rd exposition: it's not very complicated if I'm reading it correctly:

"Theoretically, developers could eschew jobs that don't allow them to creatively reinterpret code as they translate it."

It's a weak argument, because if you're translating even manually, it's not exactly the peak of creative self-expression.

There's plenty of rote code that we'd all be happy to automate translation of --- I used this technique with GPT 3.0 to get math code translated across languages for Google's color library.

[codr7]

You'd have to take a step back to see it, I think.

It's more like: in general, people will chose fun over not fun, given they have a choice.

And good developers have PLENTY of choices.

[StableAlkyne]

> you'll lose most good developers if you don't allow them to evolve and have some fun along the way

That's actually something I really like about tools like GH Copilot! It gives me an excuse to try out something using a new language, but with less of the productivity dip that comes from chasing syntax or stdlib calls. It doesn't produce code that is as good as an expert in that language, but it's a really convenient set of training wheels

So it becomes easier justify, at least with my current organization

[imvetri]

Businesses see human and machine as resources.

[codr7]

Only the losers, mark my words.