1 persons experience doesn’t prove anything. The fact is assembler is becoming less and less important as a skillset. Anyone who thinks learning it now is a worthwhile exercise is a fool. Yeah, I went through college when Assembler was a mandatory course and COBOL was an elective. Guess which was infinitely more critical in my career! In college we coded almost exclusively in PL/I, which I’ll bet was in deference to IBM. Never used it once in the real world. Like I mentioned previously, one professor said there’s no reason to learn JCL because it will be obsolete soon. That was 1980. JCL was probably the most important skill of my career. I did make one misstatement earlier about never using Assembler. One time around 2010, we needed to change IEFUSI. Three of us were able to make the necessary adjustments.
In 40+ years in IT, 20+ in tech support, other than the one time mentioned above, none of my colleagues ever needed to make changes to assembler code. In fact, making changes to delivered software can be dangerous. Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone On Sunday, September 3, 2023, 11:45 AM, g...@gabegold.com <g...@gabegold.com> wrote: I've only had three jobs (3, 14, 6 years duration) before switching to freelance writing/editing/consulting in 1994. But I'll chime in anyway with my experience using assembler as a critical part of my work. I learned and used it at IBM doing operating system development. Second job was at Mitre Corporation in Virginia, where we installed early VM. I developed tools such as a system automation tool used widely in the VM community. Same for an early system performance monitor, also widely used. I enhanced the interface routine for IBM's OS-based GPSS simulation tool to support external calls to assembler code, needed by a user. I and other system programmers developed many other assembler-based tools which met the needs of our users, who worked on various government-sponsored projects. A noteworthy project for me was getting graphics software developed for CP/67 CMS to work under VM/370 CMS, allowing a sophisticated simulation system to drive an IBM 2250 graphics display device. That application modeled air traffic control, allowing someone in the data center to "fly" a Linc Trainer small aircraft which interacted with simulated aircraft on 2250 screen to model different collision avoidance algorithms. The graphic software was many thousand lines of assembler (with comments in French, since it had been developed at University of Grenoble). We also -- as did the rest of the VM community -- used assembler to understand, debug, fix, and enhance VM. Third job was at VM Systems Group, small vendor developing/marketing/selling/supporting enterprise software. Two early products allowed taking snap dumps of the system and intercepting and avoiding VM ABENDs -- written in assembler, of course, since they integrated into IBM supplied operating system code. So assembler has been a lifelong part of what I consider to be system programming. And as others have noted, it's also occasionally essential in meeting application requirements. It also provides a good conceptual understanding of how things work at a lower level than that of high-level languages, so was helpful in understanding/explaining to users what was going in on in their applications. On Fri, 1 Sep 2023 14:43:36 +0000, Bill Johnson <mellonb...@yahoo.com> wrote: >Which proves my point from a prior thread that coding and using assembler is >almost nonexistent. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
