I'm going to be an EXTREME outlier here.
Background: I learned computing on OS/360 thru MVS, first using cards,
then TSO/ISPF. I jumped ship to Unix in the mid 80s and now I'm back on the
mainframe, doing ports of open source software to z/OS (under USS) at
Rocket Software.
I am logged into both USS (via ssh from PuTTY) and TSO/ISPF (via
BlueZone) from a Windows laptop all day long. If I had a decent tool for
accessing JES (there's no avoiding SDSF for the time being) from USS, I'd
NEVER be in TSO.
I use emacs as my development environment. I don't call it an "editor"
because it does so much more than edit text. In particular, the "shell
buffer" feature is indispensible; think of TSO session manager, but on
insane steroids. The USS port of emacs is ancient and creaky (though I
dearly hope we can remedy that within the next year), and I will grant that
emacs has a very stiff learning curve, but once you know it, it's
unbelievably productive.
For source control, I use the Rocket port of git. Essentially all of our
mainframe development is moving from other source control systems (SCLM,
cvs, svn) to git; there are good open source tools for converting from cvs
and svn that preserve all the history and branches.
For builds, I use whatever the open source project I'm currently working
on uses, which is generally some variation on automake/autoconf/configure/make.
The automake/autoconf situation on z/OS isn't yet what it wants to be. For
my own projects, I just use raw make. I often create make files that work
on both USS and Linux on Z (my go-to Unix when I need to use a tool not yet
on USS).
In short: I treat z/OS as a Unix box. Nearly all of the compilers (COBOL,
PL/I, C/C++, plus the assembler and binder) can be used from USS, on Unix
files (no need to move source, maclibs, include files, etc. into a PDS).
IBM has provided very good, albeit complex and tricky to use well,
ASCII/EBCDIC "bimodal" encoding support to ease the encoding problem. IBM
is actively porting newer languages (like JavaScript in node.js) to z/OS.
I can run TSO commands from the shell prompt (using, of course, the
"tsocmd" command...) when I need to. I keep building tools to help insulate
me from TSO and batch (like my SMP query interface at
https://github.com/zorts/smpapi), and of course Rocket continues to
release new and updated tools for free (though our bandwidth is
limited...). The big remaining hole is JES queue access. I can, of course,
submit jobs from USS, but getting the output in a nice, consumable manner
remains a challenge; hence, my TSO session.
We have a cadre of younger developers who follow a similar path, though
often using vim instead of emacs, and im some cases Windows-based editors
(Eclipse, Webstorm, SlickEdit, etc.) and FTP.
Bear in mind that my first "real" editor was ISPF, which I used for
years. Even with that history, I can't imagine using it for any serious
editing at this point.
Slight diversion: Linux on Z is a VERY nice platform. I have rarely
encountered any problems porting x86 Unix code to Linux on Z, and usually I
don't have to; it's already a real, well-equipped Unix. Given hipersocket
connectivity to z/OS, I think it's got potential to be a terrific
alternative to USS. However, it's still just too weird for many shops: it
requires a completely new set of system administration skills, its own LPAR
or VM, and it just doesn't seem to getting much traction.
-- Jerry
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