Documenting and explaining legacy code with GitHub Copilot: Tips and examples

Legacy code often poses significant challenges due to its outdated practices, lack of documentation, and complex, tangled logic, which can be daunting for developers who are unfamiliar with older technologies like COBOL or Fortran. GitHub Copilot, leveraging natural language processing, offers a solution by helping developers understand, refactor, and document such codebases. It can generate explanations, translate older code into more modern equivalents, and suggest improvements for readability and maintainability. This tool is part of GitHub's free tier, making it accessible for developers to enhance their understanding of legacy systems and prepare them for future development. By using Copilot, developers can produce clearer, more maintainable code, easing the transition from legacy to modern systems and reducing the risk of introducing errors.