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No. 43179
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For about 6 months, I've been at my first job out of college. It's working with mainframes, which use COBOL. COBOL itself, while being alien, cumbersome, hard to grok, and reliant on other languages used nowhere else like JCL, isn't the main problem. It's the tooling. My god is the tooling a hideously excruciating, byzantine nightmare.
To interact with the mainframe, you need a specialized terminal emulator, with wonderful features like not being able to adjust the viewport size. Forget about SSH. There is no command line, instead there's an abomination called ISPF. Imagine if you operated your computer entirely through nested speadsheets, that are keyboard navigated. To do something as simple as copying a file, you have to drill down to the "copy file spreadsheet", type the full paths of the old and new file into the correct cells, and run the macro. Everything is like this. Everything.
How about code editing? Forget about vim. Forget about vi. It has its own thing with its own weird conventions. For example, when it was invented, there were no arrow keys, so up, down, left and right, are f7, f8, f10, and f11 respectively. IBM did make an Eclipse fork to work with files on a mainframe, but you can only use that to view code, not edit it(at least at my job).
Version control? Forget about Git. To move code into production, there's like a 50 step process with some done in ISPF, and others in Jira, which is web app used for agile shit. Changes are documented by going to the "diff spreadsheet", running that on every file you edited to create a file with the comparison, then using a utility the terminal emulator provides to send those files from the mainframe to your machine. At my job, these are placed in a Windows shared drive.
So yeah, it's shit. At least I don't have to do anything most of the time.
Post edited on 20th Nov 2024, 7:38pm
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