Believe it or not, Cobol (in more recent incarnations, with plus signs and xml parsers among other cool new features 8-) ) remains very important for financial institutions. And there's a huge shortage of people with MVS and Cobol skills. I had a pretty fun job playing with enterprise transformation tools that slurped Cobol CICS transactions into web services.
That said, Cobol isn't going to do system administratrion so well :-) Rexx may have been the original perl-like thing, but I haven't seen it outside of IBM and like python better. Peace. Andrew On 03 Oct 2006 23:22:56 -0400, Jon Carnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 16:48, Rick DeNatale wrote: > I know that we've got members who consider themselves sysadmins, and > others who consider themselves programmers. > > I'm curious about how much overlap in tools there is between these two > self-perceptions. > > So for the sysadmins among us how many of you are using any of the > following to do sysadmin tasks. I'm talking here about managing your > scripts and configuration files, not using these tools to get or > install software from source: > Cleaning up my old mail... I wear both hats at FeatureTel, though I'm trying to pass on the Sysadmin hat to my good friend Jaimie. He has the skills, but his head just isn't big enough yet :-) > 1) make (or less likely perhaps, ant or rake) I use make a lot, but then most of the apps I run have to be pretty close to the cutting edge - and I have to customize a lot. > 2) A configuration management/repository system like cvs or subversion. We'll probably get around to this once we hire on some *real* developers, but for now I just hack and burn and script both the hacking and the burning... > > And on a scale of 0 (don't use it at all) through 1 (pure programming > language) to 10 (pure scripting language) where do you put your use of > these languages? > > bash or your favorite shell Bash is the stuff man! When I'm wearing the Sysadmin hat I give this an 8. When I'm wearing my programming hat, I give it a 2. Scripting is often a fast easy way to massage data into reports, but it's slower and not as easily formated as a real programming tools (like Python). But Bash is THE tool when you have to hack through a million lines of log output to find the one or two valid g-nuggets of info you need. > perl Perl was an early crush of mine, I thought I would love it forever... but then I discovered Python. :-) 0.1 > python Python is the true love of my life. When I'm wearing my programming hat (and not hacking out new Asterisk modules), I'm programming in Python. I give it an 8. As for Sysadmin... It comes in handy to customize some apps and even to write some of our own system monitoring tools. but it gets a 1 here. > ruby No ruby slippers for me... I haven't found a need for it yet, but then I'm not writing integrated apps for mass production. 0 > php On the sysadmin side, I hack it when I have to - but mostly I just use Python even for HTTP apps. I give it 0.2 > c(++) It's so lovely to hack Kernel code (in Cent OS 4.3), and for customizing Asterisk. I give this a 2 (on my Programming side) 0 for my sysadmin side. > COBOL <G> Just for grins I assume. Unlike Aaron, I *am* a geezer. I remember when Cobol was big (twice)... and Fortran too. I'm sure there is still some money to be made by folks who want to go that route... but I bet you won't find *any* of those folks on this list! :-) Take care! Jon Carnes -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
-- ======================= Andrew D. Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://filebox.vt.edu/~anball1/ "Festina lente" $\approx$ "Make haste slowly" -- Caesar Augustus -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
