Anyone considering assembler training first off will be hard pressed to find any training classes, and in 5 years AI will be able to produce better assembler programs than anyone here can write.
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone On Sunday, September 3, 2023, 4:41 PM, g...@gabegold.com <g...@gabegold.com> wrote: That "one person's experience" was widely shared among the VM community -- hundreds of people collectively helping their installations benefit from what assembler language enables. You might consider taking your own advice: 1 persons experience doesn’t prove anything. "The fact is..." is an assertion, not a fact. It's contradicted by a great many people who've used assembler to advance careers and benefit their employers. Given the number of critical bugs fixed by customers, and the number of customer system enhancements merged into IBM product code, sometimes NOT "making changes to delivered software" can be dangerous. Assembler -- machine language -- is what actually executes, no matter what high-level language or utility uses/produces it. So understanding it helps understand much broader concepts. Your not encountering it among your colleagues might speak more about you and your colleagues than assembler language itself. Why advocate ignorance of a fundamental part of the platform for which you're such a relentless cheerleader? This is a silly argument -- you dismiss and deprecate something you never learned; that's an uninformed position to take, no matter how many colleagues you've met in your many, many jobs. Surely it's a specialized skill -- which you never acquired -- but that doesn't make it unimportant. On Sun, 3 Sep 2023 16:37:39 +0000, Bill Johnson <mellonb...@yahoo.com> wrote: >1 persons experience doesn’t prove anything. The fact is assembler is becoming >less and less important as a skillset. Anyone who thinks learning it now is a >worthwhile exercise is a fool. Yeah, I went through college when Assembler was >a mandatory course and COBOL was an elective. Guess which was infinitely more >critical in my career! In college we coded almost exclusively in PL/I, which >I’ll bet was in deference to IBM. Never used it once in the real world. Like I >mentioned previously, one professor said there’s no reason to learn JCL >because it will be obsolete soon. That was 1980. JCL was probably the most >important skill of my career. I did make one misstatement earlier about never >using Assembler. One time around 2010, we needed to change IEFUSI. Three of us >were able to make the necessary adjustments. > >In 40+ years in IT, 20+ in tech support, other than the one time mentioned >above, none of my colleagues ever needed to make changes to assembler code. In >fact, making changes to delivered software can be dangerous. > > >Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone > > >On Sunday, September 3, 2023, 11:45 AM, g...@gabegold.com <g...@gabegold.com> >wrote: > >I've only had three jobs (3, 14, 6 years duration) before switching to >freelance writing/editing/consulting in 1994. But I'll chime in anyway with my >experience using assembler as a critical part of my work. I learned and used >it at IBM doing operating system development. > >Second job was at Mitre Corporation in Virginia, where we installed early VM. >I developed tools such as a system automation tool used widely in the VM >community. Same for an early system performance monitor, also widely used. I >enhanced the interface routine for IBM's OS-based GPSS simulation tool to >support external calls to assembler code, needed by a user. I and other system >programmers developed many other assembler-based tools which met the needs of >our users, who worked on various government-sponsored projects. A noteworthy >project for me was getting graphics software developed for CP/67 CMS to work >under VM/370 CMS, allowing a sophisticated simulation system to drive an IBM >2250 graphics display device. That application modeled air traffic control, >allowing someone in the data center to "fly" a Linc Trainer small aircraft >which interacted with simulated aircraft on 2250 screen to model different >collision avoidance algorithms. The graphic software was many thousand lines >of assembler (with comments in French, since it had been developed at >University of Grenoble). We also -- as did the rest of the VM community -- >used assembler to understand, debug, fix, and enhance VM. > >Third job was at VM Systems Group, small vendor >developing/marketing/selling/supporting enterprise software. Two early >products allowed taking snap dumps of the system and intercepting and avoiding >VM ABENDs -- written in assembler, of course, since they integrated into IBM >supplied operating system code. > >So assembler has been a lifelong part of what I consider to be system >programming. And as others have noted, it's also occasionally essential in >meeting application requirements. It also provides a good conceptual >understanding of how things work at a lower level than that of high-level >languages, so was helpful in understanding/explaining to users what was going >in on in their applications. > > >On Fri, 1 Sep 2023 14:43:36 +0000, Bill Johnson <mellonb...@yahoo.com> wrote: > >>Which proves my point from a prior thread that coding and using assembler is >>almost nonexistent. > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
