Robin Atwood said:
>Diverting the thread a tad, does anyone know where you can do an HLASM
>course? My young colleague wants to be inducted into the mysteries of the
>ancient craft and we found various IBM courses (see below) but none of them
>are currently being offered. Of course, various outfits are happy to come to
>your shop and give one-on-one instruction, but HR won't wear the expense of
>that.
Don't misunderstand me, I do feel your pain, but let's examine some (tongue in
cheek) alternatives :)
1. Print the Principles of Operation and the various current books about HLASM
and let the poor soul read them!
[I broke my teeth on the 360 POO and the 370 POO and even though English is not
my native language, I had a pretty good command on what was said there. Years
later IBM enhanced the books (i.e. farmed them out to 'professionals') so when
it got to the ESA POO I began to look at the (then) new commands and the only
thing I could've said was that the explanation was written in some dialect of
English.]
2. Adopt the methodology of the Unix, Linux and Windows echosystems, abandon
any assembly whatsoever, license C and write all code in that language. Some
of the new guys (those that did not have Java as the only language) know that
language from their collge days. That requires management to shell the money
for C compiler ("nobody on the mainframe needs that stuff!",) but that might be
cheaper then the HR shelling money for training. If many places do that, then
maybe we'd get a descent port of GCC after all.
3. If you go for alternative #2, then, I am ready to come to your site, take
inventory and convert all Assembly code into either C or Cobol (I assume that
if you have difficulties getting Assemler guys, PL/I [and PL/X] is next :(
BTW, I listened to Larry Wall (of Perl fame) talking about the most important
current languages. He discussed Java as the COBOL of the twenty first century,
verbose... good point
ZA
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