I've got a Dolly-Parton quote somewhere around here saying "I'm not offended by all the dumb-blond jokes because I know I'm not dumb....and also I know I'm not blond". I was kind of ignoring the subthread about mainframers not wanting to learn new things, because I know it doesn't apply to me. I can kind of see how it arose, though.
Seriously, I'm thinking it has less to do with the platform and more to do with a certain personality type. I knew lots (and lots, and lots) of COBOL developers who seemed to cling to that one skill and fearfully avoid having to encounter anything else. But they're not the whole mainframe world. I was worried, when I started contracting (more than 20 years ago now) that I'd never get to learn anything new. People who hire contractors, it seemed to me, wouldn’t want to do much serious training; they want to hire people who can hit the ground running. But in fact it doesn't seem to work that way: If I have one or two of the must-haves and one or two of the nice-to-haves, their response is usually "that's close enough; you can learn the rest on the job". And, of course, I can. I doubt I've had a single gig since then that didn't involve my tacking a new skill onto my resume: Top Secret, Connect:Direct, z/OS FTP, RACF, DB2 security, regular expressions, VBA/Access, VBA/Excel, SYSVIEW, fancier .bat options, a little about internet protocols, SharePoint programming... Currently I'm picking up some rudimentary PowerShell. It's a ~big~ world out there, and so far I'm still having fun. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* If you don't like my bumper stickers, vote liberal and have them outlawed! */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Farley, Peter x23353 Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2020 12:31 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Rexx parse using period as placeholder Sorry David, but I must disagree with your blanket opinion that "... experienced z/OS guys don't want to learn new stuff". I would say rather that "... SOME experienced z/OS guys don't want to learn new stuff". I am not one of those, and I have more than several colleagues at work who like me embrace new things all the time. I also have colleagues who just don't take the time to understand anything new or are very uncomfortable when new technology intrudes into their work space. My experience is that far more of the latter type are those who have abandoned technology as a career and have moved up into management positions than those of us who chose to remain technologists because that's what we like to do. But I must admit that there are some technologists who are too set in their ways or too fearful to change. This is just the normal human range of comfortability with "new things". Some old dogs do want to and do learn new tricks all the time. Some don't. Some are just slow to appreciate how "new things" can make work easier, but come around eventually. For the record I am personally very comfortable with regexen and use them all the time in awk scripts for work (yes, in both z/OS Unix and z/OS JCL) and in gawk scripts for hobby / home projects like managing my bank and credit card records. There is also a somewhat newer scripting language named "miller" that has promise. https://github.com/johnkerl/miller Perl remains a mystery to me so far and I never have gotten around to playing with Python, but I actually did briefly work with SNOBOL in MVT many moons ago (parsing COBOL and JCL sources to build a cross-reference database, unfortunately never completed) and after that got very interested in Icon for a while. Ralph Griswold was an interesting pen pal for a short time back in the 1970's. Lua remains a "new thing" for me to investigate (in my copious spare time . . . 😊 ). Peter -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of David Crayford Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2020 11:31 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Rexx parse using period as placeholder I never said "old programmers". That would be self defeating as I "am" an old programmer. My point was that experienced z/OS guys don't want to learn new stuff. And I stand by that because it's true! -- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
