On 5/1/22 8:55 pm, René Jansen wrote:
I also salute the CICS guys, who seem to have free reign to put everything in
CICS that is available elsewhere. I agree that IBM should make mainframe
emulators freely available, not only for universities. IBM should realize that
mainframes are not unlike long distance calls; any telco that does not realize
that the revenue of that is going away, is lost. The more we work on
‘modernization’, the sooner the field will be levelled. If young employees
don’t want to work on 3270 tube images or JCL, maybe we should stop hiring
prima donna’s but instead disadvantaged people who want to work and learn
something.
It's insulting to call young people prima donna's just because they
don't want to use 3270 or JCL. Are we pima donna's because we didn't
want to use paper tape and typewriters to write code? Technology moves
on and the mainframe has to keep up. And I'm happy that IBM are doing a
brilliant job of doing that.
Tragically, the true value of the mainframe, which is realized in all those
products you call old, is not realized in those ‘modern’ programming paradigms
- remember the first TCP implementation for MVS ? - it ran like a dog and
chewed up whole lpars while VTAM still did the work. This was of course because
it was a straight port of the code for some other architecture.
Have to disagree with you there Rene. I work with the guy who was the
architect for OMVS back then and TCP was implemented in Pascal with a
crap compiler. It's a topic of nostalgic jokes on our internal slack
channels.
Moving to other tools while they are not ripe for the environment would be
irrational. I don’t know what happened to the budget for Swift on z/OS but I
hope you see what I mean. A port of Python that is not ready will accomplish
the same thing. Your prima donna’s will complain that library X, Y or Z is
still not available on the mainframe and pressure their management to go off it
- I see that happen every day, while fighting performance myths and disasters
caused by ‘modern’. It is undeniable that git - which I love and use every day,
is much more complicated on z/OS because of EBCDIC, access methods, records and
block sizes. This is the reality and we should not deny it to please people who
learned to allocate a file with ‘touch test.txt’. They will get stuck without
that knowledge and hate their work even more.
A Swift port wasn't expensive. IBM had already ported LLVM to z/OS using
a ported front end and their TOBY back-end so it was just a matter of
interop. Same with golang etc, etc. Now there is a real z/OS port open
source port of LLVM the possibilities are endless. Why not be positive
about the future?
We all have different tastes and that is one thing, another thing is when that
taste is driven by commercial interests. And still another when those interests
are going against the best interest of the platform.
The best interests of the platform is maintain the system of record and
the legacy and then modernize. Otherwise, the platform with wither on
the vine.
Best regards,
René.
On 5 Jan 2022, at 05:20, David Crayford <[email protected]> wrote:
On 5/1/22 12:01 pm, Bob Bridges wrote:
Hm. If that's true of many shops (and it sounds plausible), maybe my sneers at
the colleges' ignorant comments are ill-founded and they may be starting to win
their war against the mainframe. Of course, if their efforts have a lot of
effect then surely the need for CICS will reverse the trend...wouldn't you
think?
I don't think the universities have got anything against the mainframe. They
don't have access to them. IBM should make mainframe emulators freely available
to all universities. Some of our best young guys have degrees in engineering,
not CS. It takes a long time to train new hires on the mainframe. For example,
JCL is arcane and generally despised by kids who have grown up coding shell
scripts. As you mentioned CICS it's worth noting that CICS supports both Spring
Boot and Node.js. They set the standard for modernization. The open beta has a
new has a new YAML file for resource definitions that comes with a JSON schema
so you can get context assist in editors and validation in the DevOps pipeline.
The CICS guys innovate and modernize. I salute them.
---
Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313
/* [On the observation that every culture has words equating "uncivilized" and
"foreigner":] Tragic? It's sidesplitting! It's the only joke the Almighty ever
repeats, because it never grows stale with use. -from _Star Beast_ by Robert A Heinlein. */
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of
David Crayford
Sent: Tuesday, January 4, 2022 21:48
It's true. The company I work for has been on-boarding millennials for years
now to replace the guys that are retiring. I work with some very smart young
guys, some of who write systems level code. None of them use REXX unless it's
used in a product they are working on. We're ripping and replacing decades old
build tools written in REXX with Python because it's become technical debt and
no one can support it.
The typical millenial uses:
* An IDE such as VS Code, IntelliJ, Slickedit with plugins for
mainframe languages and to access the MVS file system.
* They don't use TSO or the ISPF editor so there is no need for REXX
edit macros etc. ISPF is mainly used for SDSF and submitting jobs.
* They work in a interactive shell and use UNIX utilties.
* Everything is stored in Git repositories.
* They code scripts in Python, Node.js or a JVM language.
--- On 5/1/22 10:06 am, Seymour J Metz wrote:
That's David Crayford, not me. I have no basis to either confirm or contradict.
It's unfortunate if true.
________________________________________
From: Bob Bridges [[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 4, 2022 9:03 PM
Shmuel, I'm interested (and perhaps a little dismayed) at your third point. I've gotten
the impression, from reading ads about job openings, that REXX programmers aren't very
thick on the ground even at IBM where you'd think it'd be pretty easy to find them. But
"shrinking by the day"? Where do you get that? I'm not disagreeing -- I have
no data -- but have you?
-----Original Message-----
From: David Crayford
Sent: Tuesday, January 4, 2022 19:23
1. IBM are too busy porting contemporary languages like Python, Golang
and Node.js
2. No vendor will port ooRexx because there is no market for it that is
willing to pay support
3. The pool of REXX developers is shrinking by the day and no young
people want to learn it unless they have to
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