Sorry for this rant but I just had to step in on this conversation. That is the most hoary, antiquated, and prejudiced set of statements about application programmers that I think I have ever seen you make. I remember making stupid mistakes when I was a junior programmer and needing to ask for the systems programmer's help, but to bring up that dumb 0C7 example is just dredging up ancient history of application programming people as they MAY have been but were never ALL alike.
In my experience, most of the COBOL application programmers who are left working today (and I must admit there are fewer and fewer of us every day) are both reasonably bright and very experienced in using the tools that earn them their living. Do they know the latest CS paradigms and theories? Not always (some do!), but they can program the daylights out of a business application need, and get it done on time and with high-quality regression testing done too. Knowing how to use COBOL FUNCTION intrinsics to translate text to or from ASCII or any other code page is not rocket science, it is just normal business programming. Please get off that ridiculously high systems programmer horse of yours and join us here in the 21st century. Peter -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Gould Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2015 11:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Standard IBM Enterprise COBOL Service to convert ASCII to EBCDIC Ze'ev: Because in most cases programmers are less than lets say bright. If you bring up ASCII you will only confuse them. I suspect they will try and use it in some sort of horrendous fashion, like convert to ASCII and then back. To give you an idea how stupid programmers can be a S0C7 turns into a tech support issue as the system said it was a 0C7 so it is a systems issue. Thats how bad some programmers are. Ed -- This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any attachments from your system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
