The catastrophes caused by turning people loose in environments that they don't understand are not limited to the young, and predate digital computers by millenia. There is no substitute for experience and training. We need to provide pathways for newbies to learn and to incrementally practice what they have learned, with tasks appropriate to the learning stages that they are in. Sink-or-swim is not the best way to learn complicated technologies.
I am as disgusted as you are by the REXX bashing, but I regard porting other languages to be not only acceptable but essential. You may not like, e.g, Go, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Raku, Ruby, but if there is a lot of software in use that is written in one of those languages that you can't compile for z/OS, that makes z/OS less attractive. "Be not the first to set the old aside, nor yet the last by which the new is tried." -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of René Jansen [rene.vincent.jan...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2022 8:17 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Some UNIX file usage questions Hi David, Thanks to the pointers about the Rocket Python page being obsolete, > On 22 Jun 2022, at 13:29, David Crayford <dcrayf...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I don't share you pessimism about the young girls and boys. All the young > guys I work with are technically superb and extremely diligent. Not pessimistic at all, but I see the accidents of letting people loose on environments they don’t know. Not knowing IMS has DB and DC, and ‘rationalizing’ the compile proc. (That was quite something when it hit production.) Or my pet peeve at the moment, doing everything in WebSphere with timer beans because they don’t know Java also runs in batch, and then converting 30-minute COBOL batch jobs into 7 hour DB2 and Sysplex locking overhead dramas. Not knowing DB2 has a load utility and deleting everything with SQL. Not even knowing tables go in table spaces, The list goes on and on. You cannot reduce everything that is done on z/OS to something your Raspberry Pi can run on Linux. Because if you do, people will not see the value of the mainframe. This will push the workloads to aws and azure and will cause the loss of the reliability and dependability of the platform, which is a cultural value and not a technical. The ‘modernise the mainframe’ movement is just like the people who told us the last mainframe would be switched off in 1997, but having failed to do that, they are now targeting its software environment. I am probably just as tired of this discussion as you are, but it is hard to see people pounce on Rexx every time it is mentioned. I wish companies like yours would work to enhance and modernise Rexx instead of porting every fad - you know that Python is at the top of the hype cycle at the moment, and will be replaced - just like PHP (for sysplex z/OS, did it even leave the lab?), Swift and the ones that came before. In any case, I promise not to discuss this again if you can promise you don’t needlessly attack people for how they use Rexx. Best regards, René. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
