On 7/1/22 12:28 am, Jeremy Nicoll wrote:
On Thu, 6 Jan 2022, at 08:53, David Crayford wrote:
It's insulting to call young people prima donna's just because they
don't want to use 3270 or JCL.
Absolutely. But what's a decent alternative to JCL?
There will always be a need for JCL. Started tasks. Overnight batch etc.
So if someone prefers shell scripts to JCL, that might be ok for personal
work, but how does it work with a scheduler and job-restarts?
That's the point I was trying to make. I haven't compiled and linked a
program using JCL in over 15 years. I do everything in a shell using
commands or makefiles. REXX is really cool for converting batch jobs
into shell scripts using LINKPGM
and dynamic allocation. I can run TSO commands from the shell and pipe
the output into a pager. Sure you could easily use outtrap and write the
output to a data set and browse it but I don't work in ISPF and neither
do a lot of my colleagues.
On the other hand I have a lot of colleagues who want nothing to do with
UNIX. When we started to use Git I had to write a batch job to create
their SSH keys and document how to copy and paste from SYSPRINT into
Bitbucket. I am well aware
that there are two sides of the coin. On one side you have people like
Rob Scott who see value in new tools and will happily switch and on the
other some folks just want to do what they have been doing for the last
40 years and don't like change.
Isn't JCL already a really good tool for what it does?
Maybe, but it's a terribly designed language. I worked on AS/400 boxes
in the 90s and the Control Language (CL) was a legit Turing complete
program language. Why couldn't JCL have been the same?
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