Hear, hear! I fully support Gil's stance and assertion.
Many (80-90%?) of today's workforce of "programmers" seem to be ill-equipped to actually produce working, maintainable systems, in ANY language. Too many projects have been developed (or not) using code generators and phalanxes of "coders" who cannot function without the crutches. How many systems are currently running in the distributed world that have long out-lived the language "du jour" and the companies that sold/supported them. The current premise seems to be "Throw it all out and rewrite from scratch" for each new release (this may be a necessity, as the old code generator was "too difficult", or performed poorly, or is simply no longer available; just like their "developers", who have moved on to other things). There is nothing like the blank stare of this crop of "developers" when questioned on simple matters like Data Types, File layouts, Data Sequencing, or just: "How are you going to access this data?". Gone are the days when a talented team of five or six could produce a fairly well conceived, maintainable, major online system in three to six months (with user training, documentation, and error handling that produced useful messages). But, hey, the noobs are producing "modern" systems, that are such an advance in productivity. Again, others clearly have different views. Respectfully, Mike McCawley, Kansas City. -----Original Message----- From: John Gilmore Sent: Monday, March 24, 2014 10:24 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Another Article On Lagging Mainframe Skills . . . continued What is, I suspect, really at issue here is what sort of programmer should work in a mainframe shop; and this is a question that can be answered in different ways. My own view is that any putative programmer who cannot master regular expressions and PCRE quickly, over a weekend say, should not be employed anywhere as a programmer. Others clearly have different views. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
