skg <[email protected]> has provided us with an instructive rant. He---She is logically possible but improbable---chose this list to disparage assembly language.
He is very angry: <begin extract> "The Mainframe" is in a vegetative state. It's dead and will never come back </end extract> and yet he also finds this moribund object very threatening. Or again, <begin extract> Yet IBM has no interest in giving up on their lucrative billing strategy, so people do *fucked up* things like write full-blown applications in Assembler </end extract> Here and elsewhere his arguments, couched in incoherent, subliterate, jargon-laden language, are non sequiturs. (Even if writing a 'full-blown application' in assembly language is FUBAR, the connection between increasingly rare decisions to do so and IBM's billing practices is tenuous.) This thirtyish 'lead developer (/tech manager)' has answers to all of our problems, ready at hand. They are, however, curiousl;y inspecific. Chiefly, he thinks, the world would be a far, far better place if 1) it contained no mainframes and 2) much more use were made of REGEXs and Perl. All this is laughable, but it is also characteristic, and for this reason it bears (a little) study. -- John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
