As the term name magic indicates, you don t need proof to support your claims. Anyone desperate for solutions will whole-heartedly accept those unsupported claims. At the same time, software engineering educators deliver people skilled in contemporary development rather than enhancement programming, let alone geriatric care for aging legacy applications. Furthermore, at a panel of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, a researcher discussing the next century s challenges implied that automated conversion is solved and that the next challenge is paradigm-shift conversion. From such observations, we could conclude that automated language conversions are easy.
Any simple tool can do it.
On the other hand, language conversion seems to be risky business. We know of three companies that went bankrupt and two departments of large software-intensive enterprises that were dismantled, all because of failed language conversion projects. Tom Holmes from Reasoning states that if success means making a profit, then most conversion projects are not successful. In his book on computing calamities, Robert Glass mentions the failure of a translation system that would convert software from an obsolete system to a new one. Management told the developers that the conversion problem was limited in scope and that they would need only to convert a limited set of constructs.