Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hello World on z/OS

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 123 posts

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#41

Post by aasasd »

marbletiles wrote: post #15

I find this sort of complexity absolutely fascinating: I imagine it is similar intellectually to learning of a new order or family in biology: you understand the mechanisms and underpinning goals, but the mechanisms and results are wholly foreign to you. Had a similar experience with the Bloomberg terminal, which is a similar evolutionary offshoot. (Think "what if the GUI had never happened, but the 3270 form-style C…

I mean, DOS had plenty of pseudo-graphical interfaces in the 90s: Norton Commander, Borland IDEs and such, down to the use of the mouse―so it's rather weird seeing people treating that paradigm as completely alien.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#42

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

floatboth wrote: post #32
dralley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my older coworkers told me that IBM used to have a travelling mainframe demo in the back of a truck. As part of this demo, they would start a big computation, and then reach into the mainframe and start pulling out RAM and entire CPUs straight from the sockets, while the thing kept right on computing.

ZFS developers like to do this with hard drives :) But how did IBM do that with RAM ? Do mainframes have… redundant RAM? Like literally sticks mirroring others?

See [0] for an example of how people who are serious about fault tolerance design things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#43

Post by SuperPaintMan »

wereHamster wrote: post #5
userbinator wrote: post #4

The reason why things are the way they are on mainframes, and how you should think intuitively, becomes a lot clearer once you realise that they are a long-evolved version of the very first mechanical punched-card processors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment In fact, I'm almost willing to bet that the foreignness of mainframes to the average developer is due to mini/microcomputers having become dom…

Sure, that's certainly important to keep in mind. But that doesn't mean IBM shouldn't invest in usability.

I've managed to make do with VSCode, sshfs, reading the iconv manpage and using the USS Submit command for job cards. The current workflow has SDSF open in c3270 to the left and VSCode loaded with Cobol extensions to the right. Saving, compiling and running my code is only a few keystrokes and it's not too hard. There's even full IDEs and integration packages as other users have mentioned.

It's usable, but a little different. I mean the guys at Rocket Software have ports of some of the basic unix packages for z/OS including the Bash Shell, just adding that to USS improves quality of life tenfold. Many features are doable through USS but ISPF will always be the main interface.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#44

Post by Xarodon »

jareds wrote: post #19
sien wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They and others have. There are ways to develop in Eclipse that can target z/OS. https://developer.ibm.com/zsystems/documentation/java/jzos/j... https://www.ikanalm.com/solutions/devops-and-toolchain-orche... However, the people who develop for z/OS are often people who are familiar with Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF). It's a bit like whether people who are proficient in Vim or Emacs really benefit t…

I've been working on Mainframes for the passed 8 years full time, and several internships before that. I often go several days with out needing to use ISPF. I use https://compuware.com/workbench-mainframe-modernization/ for dataset editing, job submission, etc. I find the Unix shell you access through ISPF to be very difficult to use. Luckily SSH is available on z/OS, so if I need to do Unix stuff I can just SSH in w…

> The issue I still have with the Mainframe is documentation. Unlike most programming questions a google search does not turn up Stackoverflow results. I find I spend a lot of time going through random forums or reading the IBM doc. I don't find IBM doc easy to understand, but the more I have to deal with it the easier it gets.

You're not alone my friend, those IBM docs certainly are not easy to read/understand.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#45

Post by krylon »

jareds wrote: post #19
sien wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They and others have. There are ways to develop in Eclipse that can target z/OS. https://developer.ibm.com/zsystems/documentation/java/jzos/j... https://www.ikanalm.com/solutions/devops-and-toolchain-orche... However, the people who develop for z/OS are often people who are familiar with Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF). It's a bit like whether people who are proficient in Vim or Emacs really benefit t…

I've been working on Mainframes for the passed 8 years full time, and several internships before that. I often go several days with out needing to use ISPF. I use https://compuware.com/workbench-mainframe-modernization/ for dataset editing, job submission, etc. I find the Unix shell you access through ISPF to be very difficult to use. Luckily SSH is available on z/OS, so if I need to do Unix stuff I can just SSH in w…

> I find the Unix shell you access through ISPF to be very difficult to use.

Hehe, I once ran tail(1) and forgot to enter the file name, so tail read from stdin, and Ctrl+D did not work, so my shell was stuck waiting for input until the system was IPL'ed. Fun times... ;-)

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#46

Post by krylon »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #14

> IBM uses special and completely unintuitive names for basic concepts…. because OF COURSE THEY DO. As I recall, it's called "Bluespeak", and that sort of thing is pretty common actually. I was educated in networking at a Cisco netacad, so I use Cisco terminology that is apparently not universal. Programming languages do this too for some reason: Sum type, tagged union, discriminated union, variant...

I like that the kernel is called "nucleus". It's like parallel evolution, many concepts are the same, but they developed independently, so the naming is different.

I did not mind the names, at the time I had plenty of old mainframe hands around, who were actually happy I showed such an interest in their work, so they gladly took their time to answer any and all questions I had. Fun times... :-)

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#47

Post by fs111 »

bunderbunder wrote: post #23
dralley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my older coworkers told me that IBM used to have a travelling mainframe demo in the back of a truck. As part of this demo, they would start a big computation, and then reach into the mainframe and start pulling out RAM and entire CPUs straight from the sockets, while the thing kept right on computing.

FWIW, you could do the same thing with a Spark cluster. It might not handle it quite as gracefully, since you'd be taking down entire compute nodes, and probably some of the data storage along with them, but the computation would also be able to continue.

spark clusters still have a spof as far as I understand the architecture.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#48

Post by marbletiles »

aasasd wrote: post #41
marbletiles wrote: post #15

I find this sort of complexity absolutely fascinating: I imagine it is similar intellectually to learning of a new order or family in biology: you understand the mechanisms and underpinning goals, but the mechanisms and results are wholly foreign to you. Had a similar experience with the Bloomberg terminal, which is a similar evolutionary offshoot. (Think "what if the GUI had never happened, but the 3270 form-style C…

I mean, DOS had plenty of pseudo-graphical interfaces in the 90s: Norton Commander, Borland IDEs and such, down to the use of the mouse―so it's rather weird seeing people treating that paradigm as completely alien.

I am explaining it quite poorly. It's different from Commander etc because they were (to my mind) essentially WIMP interfaces. You could use them with a keyboard, but it wasn't really the paradigm.

BBG's terminal is fundamentally still keyboard-driven: you can use the mouse, but in the same way you can use a mouse with emacs: you're going to be driven back to the keyboard sooner or later, so you might as well stay there.

There are some introductions on YouTube, but they're all horrible. I'll see if I can find a good one.

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#49

Post by JdeBP »

krylon wrote: post #46
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #14

> IBM uses special and completely unintuitive names for basic concepts…. because OF COURSE THEY DO. As I recall, it's called "Bluespeak", and that sort of thing is pretty common actually. I was educated in networking at a Cisco netacad, so I use Cisco terminology that is apparently not universal. Programming languages do this too for some reason: Sum type, tagged union, discriminated union, variant...

I like that the kernel is called "nucleus". It's like parallel evolution, many concepts are the same, but they developed independently, so the naming is different. I did not mind the names, at the time I had plenty of old mainframe hands around, who were actually happy I showed such an interest in their work, so they gladly took their time to answer any and all questions I had. Fun times... :-)

The names "kernel" and "nucleus" are not in fact different, let alone different concepts. "Control Program" is by far the more different name in this regard.

* https://superuser.com/a/329479/38062

Re: Hello World on z/OS

#50

Post by bunderbunder »

JdeBP wrote: post #38
landbeyond wrote: post #36

Hilarious! (disclosure: I am a mainframe systems op/dev) The best part is where they didn't know about the INSERT key. I can understand z and ISPF being a hassle if you're used to modern computing but the mainframe logic is actually logical, and probably predates whatever modern stuff you're on to... like "files". :)

You mean the letter-a-going-up key. * https://superuser.com/questions/290814/

Or perhaps the, "no, don't do that, that's confusing, that symbol is an honest-to-goodness letter" key.

Useful for typing words like pâte, infâme, or grâce. Except not at all.

Post reply on HN