@numericcitizen Very early in my career I could have followed a path of mainframe COBOL, CICS and IMS but fate intervened and I went down a personal computing path. Now I hear of these mainframe related opportunities, because they still exist, and wonder whether I would have been better off maintaining those now very old skills. I haven’t written COBOL or JCL in 30+ years, but part of me thinks that it would come back to me reasonably quickly.
@frankm I think so too, those are the kind of things that are hard to forget. I wrote JCL back in 1988 and some Cobol too in 1985-1989, even 370 Assembler!
@jemostrom not necessarily. My computer science professors would say that a person with a degree ought to be able to pick up any language if they understood the fundamentals. COBOL was created at a time of punch cards and tape drives so there are concepts within it that would be foreign to a modern programmer.
@frankm while the first computer I programmed had a paper punched tape, I never got to use/try COBOL, instead I went the assembler, Basic, Pascal, C, ML, Modula-2, Ada, Eiffel, Java route. This also means that I’ve only heard “bad” things about COBOL, but I’ve never talked to someone who actually used it.
@jemostrom Most languages we developed for a specific purpose. COBOL was optimized for reporting and transaction processing so it was, and still is, used in banking and reservation systems. It did those things more easily and while it can do other algorithms it didn’t do them in the most efficient way.
@cheesemaker @frankm ahh yes, Lisp. While I’ve used Lisp, I never really got into it, I was more of a ML guy (later I’ve done a bit of Haskell). However, I’ve thought of learning Lisp again … but never really have had the time.
@jemostrom Lisp is incredibly flexible and the meta-programming is powerful, but larger projects just turned into soup. ML was a step up, but I’ve never regretted taking the long road with Haskell. Some day, I hope to recover the meta programming by moving to something like Idris or Agda. These do require a big investment in time, though.
@numericcitizen I remember ads in PC magazines from the early 80s, a man sitting at a terminal, hair, tie, clothes all seemingly blowing backward in a strong wind, with the caption ‘…flying through CICS!’ Over 40 years later, I still don’t know what CICS is, really, but I remember those ads.
@cliffordbeshers I didn’t see those ads! According to ChatGPT: “CICS (Customer Information Control System) is a transaction processing system developed by IBM for mainframe computers. It is widely used in enterprise environments to manage and execute high-volume, high-performance online transactions.”
@cliffordbeshers thanks for telling me about these languages. One thing I really wonder about regarding Agda … it’s created/developed at Chalmers. The teacher who taught me ML, and was REALLY into functional programming (he claimed that he was the only one who had written a real world application in ML), later moved to Chalmers … and it seems that he and Ulf Norell was members of the same research group 🤔
@jemostrom Well, I don’t know when he told you that, but Jane Street Capital is an ML shop and is responsible for much of the high-speed trading in the world. Chalmers is definitely an FP hub.
@cliffordbeshers ha, some 10 years ago I did an ”internship” at a company that is now a part of Nasdaq. Just for fun I took a course in Q/K and got an offer to get a job in London. Apparently there was (is??) a lack of programmers that knew Q or K.
