Are there businesses building automation and tooling for working with legacy codebases? It seems like a really good "niche" for a startup. The target market grows faster every year :)
Semantic Designs[0] is one of several companies that sells software for working with legacy codebases and programming language translation. [1] is a SO post by one of their founders that describes some of the difficulties in programming language translation.
Yeah I'm very very pessimistic in that area. Effectively I think cleaning up bad/tangled OO code to be such a difficult problem that the level of AI required is beyond not just what we can achieve but beyond what we can imagine. For example I believe it's much harder than coding entirely new applications from text descriptions of its features. That would limit the usefulness of an AI that can untangle existing code...
- Help developers build a high level understanding of the code and relationships between modules (with millions of lines, this is extremely hard)
- Automate refactoring code to reduce complexity and cross-dependencies
- Automate rewriting parts of code in mode modern languages and replacing it with some mediation layer (protobuf etc)
I think industries like finance would welcome with open arms something that can do this. And it could go for a high price if it's still saving them money on countless hours of developer time. It's a growing cost every year to maintain legacy code that was written 3+ developer generations ago, and it's dangerous in cases where peoples' lives depend on the code being bug-free (infrastructure, medical)
I think some of this already exists using APM and code analysis. The only issue is existing toolsets often display ugly diagrams in like ER format or some flow diagram. Hard to read.
