On Jan 31, 2019, at 3:25 PM, mark m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Warren Young wrote:
...there aren’t automatic programming language conversion tools...
You mean like the one I meant to use 25 or so years ago, basic2c?
All right, so it’s a bad example, but it’s bad both directions.
The problem of firewall rule conversion isn’t about protecting billions of dollars of investment in development by moving from a disfavored, underpowered programming language to a faster, better, and rising language. The economic incentive for a firewall rule conversion tool is much smaller.
I don’t think it’s entirely uneconomic to solve this problem. I see two plausible options:
1. Find everyone who has this problem, have them all chip in $1-5, and you’ll probably have enough to pay for the development of a tool at least as faithful as that BASIC to C translator you mentioned. We’ve got the crowdfunding platforms to make this possible.
2. Find a single organization that’s got this problem badly enough that they’re willing to fund the development of this tool from their internal IT/development budget. You might stretch it to two organizations resulting in a pair of collaborating developers, but beyond that, you’ve got too many cooks in the kitchen for the size of the problem, so you go to #1.
If you’re like me, both look like hard solutions, which is probably a better answer to your question than my language translator attempt.