TechRepublic: CIO Update: Future of the IBM Mainframe Looks Surprisingly Good [Linux Today]
Hmmm...
What I hated about the IBM mainframes was that a lot of the organizations that relied on them were staffed by stuffy, old-school programmers unable or unwilling to see the value in doing anything new with technology. Many times it was obvious that they were hoping to coast on their current skillset in their current job until retirement.
Forget trying to teach an old COBOL jockey about object-oriented techniques. Heck, even event-driven programming was a stretch after eating-drinking-sleeping top-down procedural programming all your life. I know COBOL programmers who insist that too many separate paragraphs leads to excessive performance overhead. You're kidding, right? What about code maintainability? Oh, right, I forgot. You're only interested in job security.
I once made the mistake of complaining about a COBOL program that I had to maintain and modify for Y2K. I said to my manager, "Man, this code ugly, and there's no documentation or comments to help." It turns out that he was the primary author of the code. He said, "Jeff, if I'd have documented all of this stuff, I'd be making $20,000 less than I am."
Don't get me wrong. I understand COBOL. I used it for close to six years between college and three years of dreadful jobs that included it. Now, I don't even include it in my advertised skillset. Yeah, I could still go back and write a PICTURE clause if I had to. Ironically, I wrote a utility in Turbo Pascal and then Quick BASIC 4.5 Professional to generate PICTURE clauses for me.
What I don't like about COBOL is its monolithic style. All variables are global. Encapsulation and modularity are hard to come by. There is no support for parameter passing to in-program functions. Dynamic arrays are a pain. And, if you're data is not fixed-length in every instance, you may as well tear your hair out manipulating variable-length strings. Don't believe me? Just try presenting a "Last Name, First Name" on a report. You'll have to munge it up with the STRING statement DELIMITED BY SPACE (or some similar junk that I've thankfully forgotten). Sure, you can call other programs by way of a LINKAGE SECTION, but please! That's a lot of crap to go through just to introduce some modularity and reusability.
Now, we could argue that some "innovative" (not) companies have revamped COBOL to put a new face on an old language. But I say that it's not really COBOL any more. Micro Focus tried to introduce Object COBOL in the mid 1990s. Now Fujitsu has introduced a .NET compatible compiler. No thanks. I don't feel like arguing about the merits of COBOL. I hope Fujitsu sells a ton of the product. More power to them.
Anyway, as far as the platform itself goes, the IBM mainframe is very robust and well-engineered. A system administrator friend of mine told me that they took an IBM mainframe and carved it up into about 1,000 virtual machines and ran virtual Linux servers on a couple of the VMs. Now that's cool.
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
