Agree completely.
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone On Tuesday, September 5, 2023, 9:59 AM, Doug Fuerst <d...@bkassociates.net> wrote: 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 > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >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
