This is quite true.
Back in the days of MVS/SE2 (pre SP1) we already had heavy
assembly language people (wrote in ALC and conditional assembly
day in and day out) say that we were at the point where no one
could know all of the system (MVS environment) -- or be Mr. MVS
as it were. And we were just running JES2, TCAM & BTAM on a
S/370-158.
By the time we (the industry) got into MVS/SP3 (ESA), how many
subsystems were there? And that handy dandy chart that showed
what was connected to what was no longer being produced.
I've been tempted many times to build a new one. Invitation to
MVS is rather obsolete as is MVS Power Programming.
SYSPLEX, WLM, IP Stack, SMS/ACS, CICS/TS, DB2, etc. Being a
Generalist, how can one get all that in their head and keep it
there? And stay current?
There have been times when I needed to know the interplay between
VSM and RSM with paging so I could understand how 64bit
addressing would handle things....
Then 3390 has broken the geometry because you have to have the
new version of NOTE/POINT to handle EAV/EAS volumes, plus PDSE
made big changes and now it is a GDG thing!
Steve Thompson
On 9/5/2023 9:59 AM, Doug Fuerst wrote:
I also think that what many of us seem to forget is that skills
need to be used to stay sharp and to learn new things in that
field.
If you are not doing Assembler a fair amount of time, the skill
dulls. Some of the worse assembler I have ever seen was written
by people who had not written it in a few years, and often I
had to deal with systems heavily modded because somebody
"loved" coding in assembler. And sadly the code was not really
much better.
The same goes for dump reading, performance issues like WLM, or
really anything.
This is a case where specialization is preferred, but my guess
is most of us are generalists, and simply do not have the time
or resources to become experts in every part of MVS there is
(excuse me z/OS and the are ALOT of parts.)
Doug Fuerst
------ Original Message ------
From "Brian Westerman" <[email protected]>
To [email protected]
Date 9/5/2023 6:32:27 AM
Subject Re: Is the IBM Assembler List still alive
Equating college and systems programming is not really
logical. I'm not aware of any colleges that "teach" how to be
a systems programmer. I think some may have tried, but I
doubt it would be a big draw.
I have a PhD, but I didn't learn to write assembler in
college, at least not any that would be usable as a systems
programmer.
I don't think everyone needs to learn how to read dumps or
write assembler to be a systems administrator, but to be a
systems programmer is seems very practical. I can't imagine
working with an operating system for a large number of years
without being able to read or write the code it's generated with.
But that's just my opinion, I'm sure there are people who
consider themselves to be systems programmers that don't have
any knowledge of assembler or know how to read a dump, or know
how to use SMP/e very well or understand ACS coding or writing
REXX or understanding the ins and outs of WLM. My personal
opinion is that it would give me an ulcer to not know what I
was doing.
Brian
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