David so badly wants his dying art to be important because it makes him feel superior. Textbook narcissist.
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone On Tuesday, September 12, 2023, 8:58 AM, David Crayford <dcrayf...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 12 Sep 2023, at 8:04 pm, Jon Butler <butler....@gmail.com> wrote: > > There will be a need for assembler programmers for quite a while, YEAH! z/OS syscalls are assembler macros! No HLASM no z/OS. The sheer volume of assembler code is an existential threat to the platform as young guys don’t want to spend 10 years onboarding. > but mainly because over the last forty years, and long after even COBOL II > added functions and a case construction in 1987, very, very clever people > decided they would write application modules in assembler... and not waste > time with comments. Today, when companies are trying to make their systems > Highly Available...or even convert to a cloud provider's service...no one has > a clue what the modules do. Many could have been easily replaced by COBOL's > ADDRESS OF or LENGTH OF or PL/I Pointers, but of course that would have been > way too easy. Very few application programs need to control channels. > > When I was interviewed by the Db2 Utilities group at the Santa Teresa lab in > San Jose (Now Silicon Valley) in 2001, I said I suppose I needed to brush up > on my assembler. They laughed and said "no one uses assembler any more." > All the Utilities were written in PL/S, now PL/X. DB2 Utilities got sold a vendor and the devs moved with it. I heard an amusing story that IBM were hell bent on migrating to OO PL/X which was so buggy the CICS team in Hursley referred to it as “oh oh PL/X”. It was in the 90’s when everybody thought inheritance was a good idea but it introduced “is-a hell” and the path length of the code exploded. It was so bad that DB2 utilities were close to missing their targets and abandoned it. It was a huge blunder. A lot of new code in DB2 Utilities is done Metal/C/ > > Not to denigrate assembler programmers, or those that decide to take up > Sanskrit, but it is a dying art. Yep. For new code avoid it like the plague. But the legacy needs to be maintained. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > 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
