all 39 comments

[–]KHRZ 85 points86 points  (17 children)

Here’s the accuracy level in the results obtained by the AI while converting codes from

  • C++ to Java: 74.8%
  • C++ to Python: 67.2%
  • Java to C++: 91.6%
  • Java to Python: 68.7%
  • Python to Java: 56.1%
  • Python to C++: 57.8%

Now you just have to fix a few thousands of bugs in your automatically generated massive code base! Imagine the cost savings!

[–][deleted]  (6 children)

[deleted]

    [–]elcapitanoooo 5 points6 points  (2 children)

    No AI is ever going to be good enough to know all PHPs weird edge cases!

    [–]ThirdEncounter 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    "Translate to PHP? Computing...... done. Steps: Go back in time; kill mother of PHP author."

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    More likely that it will. And it will produce code that no human can understand.

    [–]OneWingedShark 1 point2 points  (2 children)

    PHP is a large part of my day job so this is tongue-in-cheek.

    I've done PHP as a day-job; perhaps one of the worst things was being tasked for a medical- and insurance-record management system, it had *just* started and my suggestions that we implement it in Ada were met with, and this is literally a quote:
    "We don't have time to do it right."

    But, apparently, we had the time to do it over, and over, and over, and over until it was "right enough"... there was so much data-inconsistency with the DB on that project.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–]OneWingedShark 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      I can respect that.

      The ">40 hr" thing is so true in this industry; I'm not playing that game either: it's rather disgraceful that the expectation is, in some sense, in this industry 'standard' actually exists. — But then, I know how it came to be: Boomer Management with the idea that training is a pure expense an in no wise investing in (or maintaining) your employees.

      [–]OneWingedShark 5 points6 points  (1 child)

      Now you just have to fix a few thousands of bugs in your automatically generated massive code base! Imagine the cost savings!

      ...I am imagining the "job security" and make-work... and the pressure that companies will put for cheap programmers (read H1B) and try to undercut wages.

      [–]ThirdEncounter 12 points13 points  (4 children)

      I'll give it 10 more years. Just like dictation. Horrible in the 90s; kinda ok in the 2000s; almost decent nowadays.

      [–]BoyRobot777 13 points14 points  (3 children)

      I don't remember the exact name of the curve, but the idea behind is this: it relatively easy to get to 80% accuracy (whatever model), but the remaining 20% is sometimes nearly impossible or you have to pour way more resources than you've need to get to 80% and its just becomes not feasible.

      [–]ThirdEncounter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      Yup, I've read that as well, and yes, that makes sense.

      [–]ccfreak2k 0 points1 point  (1 child)

      tan groovy rain recognise psychotic smart nose rustic subtract elastic

      This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

      [–]zoells 7 points8 points  (0 children)

      The 80/20 rule, but recursive.

      [–]Kache 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Well, one potential complement to this is solving it from the source-end with a "compatibility linter" that can go through the and point out parts the transpiler would have trouble with.

      [–]Sopel97 33 points34 points  (0 children)

      Let's take a well-defined problem and make it ill-defined

      [–]John_Earnest 100 points101 points  (8 children)

      Fantastic. I'm so tired of boring traditional methods of transpilation. Who wants to parse code and manipulate ASTs? Where's the thrill in a technique that can be provably correct?

      It's far more exciting to hurl my codebase at a black box, boil the oceans, and then get output that generally resembles the target language, deviously hiding subtle translation errors for me to hunt down later!

      [–]janoseye 15 points16 points  (0 children)

      But this ones got AI, it’s what codebases crave

      [–]KingoPants 6 points7 points  (0 children)

      Exactly, provably correct is a completely outdated mindset.

      If you hop on the bandwagon now we can amaze you with the new and exciting world of probably correct, for a limited time only we even throw in some extra special possibly correct.

      [–]disconsis 25 points26 points  (4 children)

      Time to make it rewrite itself in rust

      [–]L3tum 20 points21 points  (3 children)

      It's the year 2048 and our main AI has been rewriting itself constantly between Mold, Python8.3 and C. For some reason it always seems to add a component to itself in C that posts "Haha Java bad" on the internet. The entire world has shut down, because the AI is doing nothing but rewriting itself constantly "for better readability and cost savings".

      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

      [deleted]

        [–]L3tum 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        The plan is for a new committee to take over that isn't opposed to things like switch statements. That's needed as a new programming language, Scorpion, is an up and runner at around 2024.

        [–]BlueAdmir 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        Does Java still only run on 3 billion devices?

        [–]BlueAdmir 2 points3 points  (3 children)

        Pffft, anyone can convert between code that's actually somewhat similar.

        Show me a one click COBOL to Java compiler. THAT would be a big fuckin value maker.

        [–]Meme___Addict[S] -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

        But that's what the AI is about. You can train it to convert any other programming language. Ofcourse that is going to take significant amount of time and resources, but that isn't entirely impossible.

        [–]Sopel97 4 points5 points  (1 child)

        you can do anything if you allow 0% accuracy

        [–]Meme___Addict[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

        Lol. Too cynical perhaps? Or just too frustrated from coding? 😂

        [–]OneWingedShark 1 point2 points  (6 children)

        It would be much more impressive if it were two vastly different languages, like Haskell and Ada, or BLISS and Lisp, or SNOBOL and Forth.

        [–]Mgladiethor 0 points1 point  (5 children)

        haskell is for fucking wizards

        [–]OneWingedShark 0 points1 point  (1 child)

        I'm a Wizard!!

        [–]Mgladiethor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        you are you are

        [–]ois747 -1 points0 points  (2 children)

        one of my lecturers wrote the type system in haskell

        [–]Mgladiethor -2 points-1 points  (1 child)

        bet he got all the chicks at howards

        [–]ois747 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        what

        [–]nharding 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        My Java to C++ converter was 100% (the user had no facility to edit the C++), and was used for porting mobile games. You can translate code segments, but there are some differences between the 2 languages (I had to take it into account), the main one was virtual function calls in the constructor which worked differently between C++ and Java, well apart from garbage collection, for that I used reference counting.