Does anyone have experience with the following use cases for coding assistants for your data teams: upgrading legacy coding languages, supporting continued use of legacy coding languages? Could you share what has or hasn’t worked well?
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If you're talking about coding languages, the most famous use case for the impact of either maintaining legacy coding skills or upgrading them is COBOL. Doing neither is what led to the collapse of many systems during the COVID emergency. The one that comes immediately to mind is the Unemployment system collapsing in Florida and it taking AGES to get back up because it was outdated and nobody knew COBOL. I just googled "COBOL" by itself and this came up 4th to tell you how big a deal this is
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
I know of people using coding assistants, and in particular I've worked on projects where our developers, not our data team, tested it out with javascript and with python. It worked VERY well for those developers who were highly skilled and could tell "good" code from what's not. They also, anecdotally, were our in general best communicators. They were able to draft and iterate quickly. However, for the programmers who did not communicate what they needed as clearly, it was not as helpful. If you plan on using those assistants, make sure they're in the hands of your most capable code writers and readers, or are supervised by those most capable.
Thank you for taking the time to post this response and article. We are challenged with the amount of complex COBOL systems still in operation that provide unique public sector business capabilities not used elsewhere and the retirement of COBOL programmers. We are addressing through upskilling and recoding/refactoring/replatforming these applications. I'm interested in the success of others and how coding assistants were used.
If you're talking about codes that represent classifications or data points, like classification codes, industry codes, procurement codes, etc., I generally support the continuous development of crosswalks as they develop and strong documentation for any classifications that have been retired. Example of this is the breakoff of video game rental stores out of general retail establishments in NAICS codes, as it was dragging the whole sector down, and its eventual retirement.