z/OMG

by dmoney • 17 years ago

59 33 17 years ago

seldo• 17 years ago

The thing that struck me about his awestruck description of the awfulness of System Z and its editor was "hey, that sounds a lot like vi".

I heart my graphical IDE.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

Take a week to learn modal editing and you'll never go back.

nrr3• 17 years ago

I am a counterexample to your claim; hence, it is false.

I'm very fluent in vi(m), but I still end up going back to Emacs (well, MicroEmacs) every time for anything beyond doing hacks to configuration files. Why? I like having a heavily extensible development environment.

I also write Scheme, but that's another thing altogether.

aerique• 17 years ago

Editing isn't modal for everyone. I've used vi and Vim for years but I don't use them for more than a quick edit in a file these days.

lucumo• 17 years ago

I did for a year. I went back.

Running.

maigret• 17 years ago

Well they are graphical IDEs for mainframes. Java is also running very well on mainframes, as well as many web/appservers. This article makes a simplistic, though a bit funny image of the mainframe. Yes, the core and old stuff looks like that - no, there is also modern software running on the mainframe, else companies would stop investing in it.

nrr3• 17 years ago

This account right here makes me want to be a mainframe programmer for a living.

Writing software for microcomputers that sells is for chumps. Mainframes are where it's at, if for no other reason than the fact that "relabel[ing] one line of [a] procedure between one software version and the next will break somebody else's program."

tsally• 17 years ago

The same author wrote a really great piece on gay marriage from a database engineering perspective: http://qntm.org/?gay

tdoggette• 17 years ago

He's also active on everything2.com, a Slashdot sister site from way back, as sam512. If you poke around on his site that's linked here, you'll also find some excellent science fiction and various other entertaining bits of writing, including that set of essays on how to destroy the Earth that I'm sure you've read at some point.

mrlebowski• 17 years ago

The author paints too grim a picture of mainframes. Isn't legacy code supposed to be that way? As far as I know, not many new code projects are being done on mainframes. But whatever is there, has to be maintained/upgraded. Mainframes are NOT as difficult to use as the author says. They power most of the big life/general insurance companies, and they do interface well with front-ends [with XSLs in middle to convert from/to string streams]. I have worked for two years on mainframes, and loved the simple editor. Like with any command-line type editor, it has its quirks, but once you learn it, it is very fast. Also, z/OS has some version control systems (Endevour), and really good debuggers.

AndrewDucker2• 17 years ago

Absolutely.

After all, you can happily run DB2 on Z/OS, and access everything via stored procs from smaller machines. his gives you external access to data without going through green screens.

thismat5• 17 years ago

Some people still refuse to invest in DB2 though, and so you're stuck with VSAM/Flatfiles for your data. It's a horrible time sink.

cturner• 17 years ago

I like this guy's witty banter, and his substitution of acronyms. But I particularly like this:

    ICBM System z is the Stonehenge of computing platforms.

You go to the wiki page and look at the picture of the system and think "I can actually imagine a circle of these systems being set up and seeming very very much like stonehenge".

83457• 17 years ago

Looks like an over-sized gaming console to me -- like if someone created 10 times larger PS3 for a videogame store display.

ahlatimer• 17 years ago

Reminds me of working on HP's MPE OS (I believe I was using an HP 3000) in COBOL to keep a couponing system up and running. I won't say it was a terrible experience, but I certainly wasn't a fan of MPE or COBOL by the time I left.

djehuty• 17 years ago

I get the impression that moving away from COBOL, "Big Iron", and such dinosaurs has, after the initial wrench, made companies more productive. All of which makes me wonder what part the army of salesmen that go with these things play in their continued existence. (And the executive-ego-stroke of having an impressive room dominated by a bond-villianesque monolith.)

thismat5• 17 years ago

In my experience, the reasons are mostly just because it's been the standard for so long at said shop.

Most people using mainframes don't make money off of their IT department, their programmers are expensive and don't produce profits. Investing in a large change from "what works and has a fixed cost" to something new and possibly troublesome or more expensive (initial cost) just isn't a priority for them.

Not to mention the retraining you'd have to do. A lot of these programmers are either old and unwilling to learn, or just uninterested in rocking the boat. So is it worth it to have to fire people or get subpar code, or just stick with what's working that keeps you generating a profit and keeps your current programmers job security?

Tichy2• 17 years ago

What are these things used for? Why can't they ever go away? I don't really believe it...

AndrewDucker2• 17 years ago

They're used by people running massive systems that want all of their data to be accessible at incredibly high speeds.

We're talking about systems designed for throughput. For processing huge amounts of data in overnight batch processes. For five nines uptime. And for still being compatible with the code you wrote 30 years ago that still manages millions of customers.

thismat5• 17 years ago

Right, and incredibly high speeds is definitely accurate. I can't remember the amount of instructions/second our mainframe can handle, but I remember it being in the multiple hundreds of thousands.

GeneralMaximus2• 17 years ago

How fast would one of those monsters be compared to, say, a modern day Mac Pro?

baxter• 17 years ago

A couple of years ago I spent just over a year working as a mainframe developer on a System/360 set of mainframes and the author's description of mainframe development seems accurate.

I grew very fond of JCL, EBCDIC and the text editor despite, or perhaps due to, their idiosyncrasies. Not that I would ever go back ;)

rman666• 17 years ago

Nice clean blog pages. I don't care as much for the home page, but the individual article pages are easy on the eyes.

z/OMG

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