This is possibly one of the more cursed single sentences I've ever seen in a job posting

[cptsuperlative@toot.cat]

@aud

Oh, I'm sure that'll be error-free!

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] who needs accuracy when you've got VC money?!

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud Basically, yeah. If you have a candidate for an algorithm that can solve the halting problem, you can turn that into an example that the algorithm can't solve.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

sentences more appealing in a job description:

We're combining my foot and your crotch to translate kinetic energy into pain
We're combining pliers and your fingernails to ||redacted||
We're combining onions and belts to translate fashion into what was the style at the time
We're combining lotion and its skin to ensure customers don't get the hose again

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud Yeah, you can basically encode arbitrary computation in the package version constraints.... it almost never comes up in practice. Almost.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] ha ha suck on that algorithm

(once you pointed it out it was super obvious it was the halting problem just... you didn't literally say "lo, it is the halting problem", but I have no idea why that didn't occur to me before that?! gonna blame the headache and the election)

[foolishowl@social.coop]

@aud @CptSuperlative Famously stability is a low priority for applications running in COBOL.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] uhh

sorry, wait, what?

You can do what in a fucking conda

jesus

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] COBOL? co DEEZ ball. s. balls. in... your mainframe.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@aud It's a 3SAT reduction... The fact that you can have non-overlapping ranges of versions allowed gives you a lot of expressive power.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] The more I learn about computing, the more I understand why @[email protected] has so many strong feelings about packaging.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] "COPILOT" but it's just a guy deeply into COBOL programming and aviation and he lives in a forested area and he hates programming but will happily call your code shit if you pay him enough to review it.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] "COPILOT, please write a for loop in java with proper documentation"
"dipshit money boy, I made love to your mother who was a vastly superior programmer to you. We bonded over what a fucking disappointment you are."

[xris@ecoevo.social]

@xgranade @aud
It needs to remain maintainable. Otherwise, COBOL *is* your source code now.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@xris @aud I guess, but I wouldn't expect the result of COBOL → Java to be maintainable? Normally how I've seen that kind of move away from legacy done is use the legacy language (here, COBOL) as the source of truth, then gradually replace it one module at a time rather than trying to maintain the output of transpilation.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@xris @aud I guess that gets back to @ireneista's point about COBOL being line-oriented, though... that would absolutely make it much harder to replace module-by-module.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] Perhaps that's why they think this will "totally work": why, LLMs are so "natural" and human like! Unlike that awful machine transpilation (which, you know, is auditable and not stochastic and actually works). So they, perhaps foolishly, think of this output as being maintainable?*

* they probably don't think any of this, but I wonder if that's somewhere in their brains as re: how this all works.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] oh, well. There's that too. I dunno much about COBOL so I don't have that level of insight into the problem.

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@aud @xris @xgranade there's that for sure. the idea that functions and code blocks should always have well-defined boundaries, not porous edges, had to be invented. any attempt to translate to a modern language needs to grapple with that tension. in our other thread we wrote about our experience writing a mechanical translator for a language called DB/C...........

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@aud @xris @xgranade but like the other big problem is that the contexts where code in line-oriented languages are still in use are things like banking and aviation

where the risk of making ANY change is just enormous, let alone replacing the whole thing