For finding patterns & connections, AI is a great tool. Sure, it will find the dependencies & workflows.

After that, you're going to need a good engineer, who knows the risks, to guide the AI and explore what the code is doing.

Translating the code to another language is the easy part. Understanding what you start with and verifying the translation is what makes these projects hard. AI is just another tool, like spreadsheets and project planning software that makes some parts a bit easier or even possible.

Most of the comments in this post are not that engineer. They're the manager who says "All you have to do is..."

UK management at its typical.

Exactly this.

I used to buy comics every week and read them. They stacked up to 2-6 inches. I was up to $75/week and decided to stop.
In the 20+ years since I haven't been able to get into reading comics again. When I look to buy, I'm not easily interested. When I do buy, I might not read it. That's a hobby that has sailed on for me.

I still buy other types of books. ebooks are good for novels. Put them on your phone and you always have it with you. If it draws you in, you'll make time. Until then, it's ready in your pocket.

Computer books have really declined. I once had half the O'Reilly catalog. All of that type of info is now online, for free and searchable. The last few physical books I purchased were obsolete within a year. As a devops type, reading is a huge part of the job and the info is not in books anymore.

For my hobbies, I still read books. One is woodworking. Lots of the info has moved on to blogs or youtube. I do hand tools and archive.org has tons of historical books and I can also purchase PDFs for some of the books I buy. For every physical book I have on woodworking, I have 20 ebooks from archive.org and have a local search setup for all of them.

AI has lots of data about OSS. Source, working programs, guides, blogs, git/svn logs.

How would it work on proprietary code? Especially code that doesn't use lots of OSS (how much is left nowadays?)
Would it have enough data? This could be an argument against OSS being less secure.

The trope is for 8 megs. My 486 motherboard couldn't go beyond 16MB and adding 8MB was > $2000.

Linux would run, with X11, on 4MB. So double the RAM and emacs still caused swapping.
Luckily, web browsers came out and made emacs look frugal with RAM

UPS has a standard training program for drivers.
When the drivers get their route, UPS has eliminated left hand turns, avoided stop signs and other things. It makes the route safer and reduces fuel usage. They were using route mapping before GPS, before internet, before the 80286 existed.
Because of their scale, when gas got to be more than $1/gallon (90s), they were experimenting with CNG until the gas price came down again.

When I pass a UPS truck doing a delivery, it's usually off the side so it doesn't cause a driving hazard.

Amazon doesn't do any of that. Its left up to the contractor. So is all liability
During delivery, they are not off the side, often hidden around the corner or placed before a corner and causing a blind spot. It a gamble going around because of where they chose to stop the truck.

Amazon will never do anything to improve the safety of delivery for the drivers or the general public. They will never let their franchises get big enough or profitable enough to justify the cost of anything like what UPS has done through the years.

Apes make a nest at night by bending & breaking branches. So of course we did too.

Its just that stone, bone and metal get preserved better. All the archeologist have been doing the equivalent of searching for a lost item under the lamp because the light is better

Sometimes I could work on diet and my stomach would shrink. I couldn't eat as much. But I was always hungry and ate the same portions. My stomach size increased

With these meds, I no longer have the constant hunger. Before, couldn't really tell when I was full. Now I can hear the signal.

I'm changing habits, switching portion size tracking what I eat and keeping within a calorie budget. Its been a game changer. I hope I can continue it when I'm off.

I wonder how much of their server products and office products are not cloud nowadays?

How many companies switched from running Exchange in their data center to outsourcing the email server? How many are big enough to justify the IT costs of running an email server? Keeping up with security against minor and state level actors. Purchasing the bandwidth to ingest spam that come in alonside legit emails.
How many colleges and Universities no longer run email servers for students and staff?

The market to run those private copies has shrunk too. What can't you do on a phone or tablet or a computer's web browser (being win, mac, linux, chromebook). The capabilities are increasing too. Emulators can run in web browsers. And CAD systems.

When I 1st used a spreadsheet, I was studying engineering. I was doing something like https://www.omnicalculator.com...

It took 60 seconds to enter all the numbers on a calculator. I needed to iterate over it to find the right material/diameter/etc. I could have written a program in BASIC or Fortran. Then I'd need to think about input, output, loading/saving a file.

A spreadsheet let me change 1 number and iterate. I didn't have to program anything except the formula. I wasn't even doing muliple lines! Spreadsheets are a decent UI for math and lists.

This was DOS days and I might've used Lotus or Multiplan. There were so many varients of spreadsheets back then. Lotus Improv on NeXT looked innovative.

If there was competition, maybe we'd get something with a similar UI to a spreadsheet, but that was easier to debug, could scale like a database.

Many college students can do everything they need on a phone.

In fact, there are many things that only exist as apps on a phone.
Most of use can still choose iPhone or Android.

Linux has really become the way for servers. Many Linux devs use Mac & homebrew instead of Linux too.

How many Linux only desktop apps are there (I remember ones for all the Unixen with CAD, FPGA, etc)

What is keeping the apps on Windows or Mac? And driving them to iPhone/Android instead of Web?

He left Red Hat for Microsoft in 2022...

Perl 4 was great. Instead of all different versions of awk (awk, nawk, gawk), shell (some had functions, some didn't, bash wasn't everywhere nor was ksh. csh varied too!) on the different Unices, you had a tool that could work the same on all of them. Plus lots of modules. Perl 5 continued this

Eventually the Unices converged to Linux and the GNU versions of awk, shell, etc. And python came & caught up to Perl's modules. Perl got mired in Perl 6.

With python, there is an enforced style so everyone reads the same way. There is usually an obvious way to do things.

Perl's motto is "There's more than 1 way to do it" and I think many of the books/perl programmers go out of the way to prove it.

I do enough puzzle solving in my job. I want my programs to be obvious and easy to understand 6 months later.

I'm sure that was a milder choice of words than is usually spoken at that company

I had a UK manager explain that when he had bad news for his boss, he had to carry a plastic model of the poo emojii when he delivered it. Childish and boorish. Him for talking about it, worse for his boss(s).

We are led by donkeys.