I also think that what many of us seem to forget is that skills need to
be used to stay sharp and to learn new things in that field.
If you are not doing Assembler a fair amount of time, the skill dulls.
Some of the worse assembler I have ever seen was written by people who
had not written it in a few years, and often I had to deal with systems
heavily modded because somebody "loved" coding in assembler. And sadly
the code was not really much better.
The same goes for dump reading, performance issues like WLM, or really
anything.
This is a case where specialization is preferred, but my guess is most
of us are generalists, and simply do not have the time or resources to
become experts in every part of MVS there is (excuse me z/OS and the are
ALOT of parts.)
Doug Fuerst
------ Original Message ------
From "Brian Westerman" <brian_wester...@syzygyinc.com>
To IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Date 9/5/2023 6:32:27 AM
Subject Re: Is the IBM Assembler List still alive
Equating college and systems programming is not really logical. I'm not aware of any
colleges that "teach" how to be a systems programmer. I think some may have
tried, but I doubt it would be a big draw.
I have a PhD, but I didn't learn to write assembler in college, at least not
any that would be usable as a systems programmer.
I don't think everyone needs to learn how to read dumps or write assembler to
be a systems administrator, but to be a systems programmer is seems very
practical. I can't imagine working with an operating system for a large number
of years without being able to read or write the code it's generated with.
But that's just my opinion, I'm sure there are people who consider themselves
to be systems programmers that don't have any knowledge of assembler or know
how to read a dump, or know how to use SMP/e very well or understand ACS coding
or writing REXX or understanding the ins and outs of WLM. My personal opinion
is that it would give me an ulcer to not know what I was doing.
Brian
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