On 06/29/2010 10:08 AM, George Orwell wrote: >> Our application programmers are not that familiar with z-architecture, >> much less Assembly Language; but those of us in mainframe Technical >> Support certainly are. > > Judging from the questions asked on this list, the above statement is > certainly not true. While sysprogs may be familiar at a deep level on many > aspects of z/OS, especially tuning and customization, understanding > assembler and systems software (and how to write it) are certainly not > among them. Not to say we haven't had one or two posters who *do* > understand those things, but the vast majority of sysprogs and the vast > majority of sysprogs *on this list* demonstrably do not. ... I obviously failed to convey the intended meaning. In the context of "Our application programmers" I intended "us in mainframe Technical Support" to be similarly specific to our installation, not a general statement about sysprogs everywhere. I believe all of our mainframe sysprogs at Data-Tronics have a general knowledge of z-architecture and could make sense out of Assembler code, and at least half of those deal with Assembler code often enough to be fairly competent.
Thirty years ago there was significant use here of Assembler in applications areas, but there is only a little of that left and only in some very narrow areas, so I would be surprised to find as many as 5% of Applications Support able to deal with Assembler; and I don't have a problem with that as long as we maintain a cadre able to deal with any issues. DTC maintains a Training Department and makes a significant investment in initial training and continuing education using materials developed locally, with classes taught by Training personnel, Technical Services personnel, and some of the more experienced applications programmers. New recruits spend a significant percentage of their first 6 months in classes and working closely with a "trainer" from their assigned department, who serves as a mentor. Over the decades we have consistently found through contacts at conferences that our installation tends to support higher CICS transaction rates and higher DB2 query rates than many other sites while using less hardware, which gives us a distinct competitive advantage. I attribute that to a large extent to continual performance monitoring and tuning efforts spearheaded by Technical Services over the years, which in a large part have depended on Technical Services personnel understanding the nature of the hardware platform on which we run - and some understanding of machine language and Assembler is part of that picture. -- Joel C. Ewing, Fort Smith, AR jremoveccapsew...@acm.org Sr. Technical Admin., Mainframe Systems, Data-Tronics Corp. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
