Re: Telling the modern mainframe story
docdwarf_at_panix.com
Date: 02/27/04
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Date: 26 Feb 2004 19:33:12 -0500
In article <20040226094844.03003.00000366@mb-m15.aol.com>,
S Comstock <scomstock@aol.com> wrote:
>'Lo,
>
>Last month my wife and I were at a dinner at a friend's house. We got to
>talking about work and the hostess mentioned she was a COBOL programmer at a
>local company. I asked what version of COBOL she was using. "I don't know,
>COBOL 370 or something like that."
>
>I pursued her knowledge a little bit and was shocked to find she had no idea
>about the changes in COBOL, mainframes, the Internet, and so on, for the last,
>say, 10 years!
>
>For someone who strives constantly to be current, this blew me away. But I got
>to thinking about it and realized she was probably more typical than I am. More
>typical than the people who subscribe to this list.
And this might be why she does what she does... and you do what you do.
>
>It drives me nuts realizing how little both management and technical people
>know about what's going on in their field.
I am not sure if this is the cause or it is the difference between 'if it
ain't broke, don't fix it' and 'let's take it apart to see how it works!'
A buddy o' mine used to be Materials/Inventory Manager for a jewelery
manufacturer... he could never understand folks who considered inertia to
be valuable, in and of it'sself. After a meeting where things got a
bit... heated a VP took him aside and asked, seriously, what the problem
was... after all, in his (the VP's) department they'd been doing things
exactly the same way for the past twenty years.
'Where's your passion for work?', asked my buddy, 'Where do you strive to
do something more, where to you work to make things better?'
'You don't understand', said the VP, 'we've been doing the exact same
thing for the past twenty years.'
The VP could not understand why anyone would not see this as a Very Good
Thing.
>IBM's not telling the story very
>well, that's for sure. Mainframes are still perceived as obsolete clunkers by
>the vast majority of people - even in the industry.
Even before mainframes were 'perceived as obsolete clunkers'... how many
programmers in a given shop are allowed any sort of training in language
changes, as opposed to 'pick it up as you go along... and Prod Must Not Go
Down'?
And the there's... well...
From:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=7cucq6%24san%241%40clarknet.clark.net&output=gplain>
--begin quoted text:
>Other may prefer programming languages with more modern
>constructs.
Others may, sure... but let them *try* to get some code past a review and
implemented into Prod!
'What is *this* stuff? EVALUATE TRUE WHEN cond-1 imperative statement...
you call this COBOL?!?'
'Oh, please, Mr Standards-and-Practises Reviewmeister, it is exactly what
is allowed by the ANSI '85 Standard.'
'ANSI '85? Crap, I *knew* things were goin' ta hell in a handbasket when
we allowed them fancy ANSI '74 constructs in a couple a' years back...
look, 1985 is only 14 years ago, we oughta wait until the technology is
Really Proven before we implement it. Go back and rewrite this in *real*
COBOL, then try again.'
--end quoted text
This was posted in 1999... things have changed so very much since then,
haven't they?
DD
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