Re: OT : Bad week

[hardburn]

As long as we're venting . . .

I've been learning to program for the AS400 at work. It's not technically Big Iron, but it derives from systems that are. Most of the programming languages and data formats were designed back when punchcards were all the rage, and it shows. You get people writing books about RPG (one of the big languages on the system) who have been doing this since 1977 and write things like this:

Some people think C is a brief language. Actually, RPG is the briefest of all high level languages.

Which just goes to show that experiance does not imply actual thinking ability. These sad sobs actually think they're becoming modern because they can write "free form" code, as opposed to being forced to put certain data in certain text columns (for instance, a comment in RPG is denoted by putting a '*' in column 16 (IIRC)). Such a move is clearly bringing the platform into the 1980's. At least, it will once IBM works out the bugs in the free-form interpreter.

I know my company has some Java on there already, and I might actually write some Java code instead of RPG. Whatever you might say about Java, it'd be an improvement over the hoard of other languages on this beast that don't belong on this side of 1985.

I've read that perl will compile on this thing, but I'm not sure how well the various database formats are supported. There is a DBD::DB2 driver, but my company isn't currently using DB2. I'm not sure what the internal formats used for db works, but I'll bet they're propreitary.

What I am most facinated by on this thing is the clash of cultures. IBM (back in the '50s) was the role model for American buisness--uptight, everyone wearing the exact same suit, etc. I come from a programming background largely influnced by modern tech culture--free-wheeling, churn out code, hack it, hack it good, etc. It'll be interesting to see this play out.