On 2020-03-31 7:58 AM, Jack J. Woehr wrote:
On 3/30/20 3:15 PM, Farley, Peter x23353 wrote:
Hi Peter
Jack,
One problem with your advice is that many shops don't even allow
application programmers to even use shell access to z/OS.
One of the reasons z/OS installations are going away. The dinosaur
keeps moving forward or she sinks into the tar pit.
I agree. It's curious as to why a site would restrict usage to shell
access and limit home directory disk space when disk is so cheap (even
on mainframes).
They must consider mainframer's to be a bunch of troglodytes who should
stay chained to their green screens and punch cards ;)
It's a wonderful scripting language as well as a good scientific
language. There's nothing else quite its caliber in interpretive
languages.
Whoa, that's a big call! Python became popular because it has a
humongous standard library and eco-system. As you mentioned, it's become
the standard for
scientific/numerical programming because of of a ton of high performance
libraries written in C++, many of which to exploit GPUs using platforms
like CUDA.
Having said that, Python has plenty of warts. It has poor support for
anonymous functions, you get their poor cousin, lambda functions. Python
scoping is at the function level
which can be a (unpleasant) surprise to those coming from languages with
proper scoping. Python has a global mutex lock (GIL) which makes
multi-threaded programming almost
impossible if performance is an issue.
I can think of a few dynamically typed languages that are designed
better than Python. But none that are as well equipped.
Advice is only as useful as your particular circumstances allow.
Many of us exist in quite constrained boxes at work with very limited
ability to even make a request to expand the scope of those boxes.
Been there, done that. But IBM is trying to help expand the walls of
that particular golden cage by marking Python "strategic". Let's see
if that makes a diff.
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