John, Do you happen to know whether or not he had bought into the chestnut that "high-level" languages were self-documenting and that Assembler was necessarily unintelligible spaghetti? In terms of worrying about maintainability - when someone made the original programmer an offer he/she couldn't refuse - or the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune took him/her away before his/her time - as a manager, with no actual experience of having put pencil to coding sheet, he was just doing his job - and he appears to have just retired from active service.
I once had a manager who knew what his folk did, having been the leading light taking care of one of the very early 360/67s (Newcastle University) - a box often mentioned in this list/group. He said about my Assembler writing that it was the most maintainable - for Assembler - he had ever seen - every line commented, maximum use of symbolic names (including registers - not just Rn, n=0-15), an asterisk box for each set of instructions (probably never more than 10). Some might argue that glancing over someone's shoulder would be inadequate for judging how well structured an Assembler program was - and they'd be right. Somewhat indirectly the desire to give registers names that said what they did and the fact there are only about 10 registers available to play with between storing and restoring encourages smallish subroutines and that tends to keep the pasta at bay. However I can see that the fact that a "VICTOR ... B HUGO"[1] could appear in a program - as if something equally crass could not equally appear in a COBOL, PL/I or C program[2] - might give Assembler a bad name. Chris Mason [1] This is not made up; it was seen in a business program. Also I heard that the comment "HERE COME THE APACHES" could be found somewhere in the output from DOS (now VSE) system generation. [2] The FORTRAN I used to know wouldn't allow anything like this but maybe a more modern version would. However, checking your post again, I see you don't mention FORTRAN - perhaps your prospective employer didn't design solenoids, the subject of the only FORTRAN program I ever had to write in anger. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chase, John" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, 28 June, 2006 5:32 PM Subject: Re: Curiosity > > -----Original Message----- > > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List On Behalf Of David Shein > > > > Not from where we sit. We are a vendor and the lack of > > skills (and interest, which is what you asked about) has > > grown inexorably for more than a decade now. We see it > > everywhere, vendors and IT shops alike. It makes our job > > increasingly difficult. Just to select an obvious example > > from the many available, no one under age 45 seems to know > > anything at all about mainframe assembler, and even that's > > pushing it. The youngest one I know personally is about 48 or 49. > > Twenty-odd years ago, when I was still on the "Applications side", I > interviewed for one job at which programmers were given the option to > code in COBOL, PL/I or C. I asked, "What about Assembler?" The > interviewer replied, "Anybody who even thinks about Assembler ought to > be taken out and shot!" > > That's when I started looking for (and soon found) an opportunity to > move to the "Systems side". > > -jc- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
