Mainframes Are Having a Moment • Hacker News Board

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#41

Post by gwern » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

DebtDeflation wrote: post #3

The surge in demand is being driven almost entirely by state unemployment systems. Most of these systems haven't seen a surge in unemployment claims since the 2009 recession and haven't had to change the underlying rules governing eligibility in even longer. Once the systems are patched and/or the surge in new claims subsides, 90% of this sudden demand for "Cobalt programmers" will evaporate. It's one thing for retir…

And at such low pay, too:

> As recently as this week, jobs boards such as Indeed and Dice.com listed hundreds or in some cases thousands of openings for mainframe positions at all levels. Advertised pay ranges from $30 to $35 an hour for a junior mainframe developer to well over $150,000 a year for a mainframe database administration manager.

If you are talented and patient enough to do software archeology which will affect millions of people, I think you can make (a lot) more elsewhere.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#42

Post by ardy42 » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

jabedude wrote: post #35

jasonjayr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had to chose an environment or programming language that you expect to survive, in regards to talent pool + tech availability for 30+ years today, what would you choose?

C + Linux. That seems to be the most promising tech with regards to longevity that exists today.

> C + Linux. That seems to be the most promising tech with regards to longevity that exists today.

It really depends on the application. C & Linux will literally be around forever, but C isn't the best language for a line-of-business application like an unemployment system. Java would be a better fit for something like that.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#43

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

jasonjayr wrote: post #33

vageli wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The surge in demand is being driven almost entirely by state unemployment systems. Most of these systems haven't seen a surge in unemployment claims since the 2009 recession and haven't had to change the underlying rules governing eligibility in even longer. Once the systems are patched and/or the surge in new claims subsides, 90% of this sudden demand for "Cobalt programmers" will evaporate. I generally agree but…

If you had to chose an environment or programming language that you expect to survive, in regards to talent pool + tech availability for 30+ years today, what would you choose?

1. Formally defined semantics

2. Simple (LR1) grammar

3. Small, as a language

4. Static types (static need not be inflexible. Scala is static but very flexible. Perhaps overly so but whatever)

5. No undefined behaviour

6. All dumb holes such as buffer overflow always checked for

7. Good supporting tools (vague I agree but necessary)

8. Suitable, well-designed library

9. Not repeat not designed by the government which will make an utter mess of it all.

10. And pigs will soar

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#44

Post by tgflynn » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #22

tgflynn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VAX's were minicomputers, not mainframes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000 "The VAX 9000, code named Aridus or Aquarius, was a family of supercomputer and mainframe computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA)."

I never heard of that model. I suspect it probably wasn't very successful because DEC started to move to the Alpha architecture not many years later.

I worked with a lot of VAXen back in the day but I never heard anyone refer to them as "mainframes".

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#45

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #37

jasonjayr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had to chose an environment or programming language that you expect to survive, in regards to talent pool + tech availability for 30+ years today, what would you choose?

Both C++ and Java are pretty obvious choices aren't they? Both have probably billion lines of code or more investments into them and are the backbone of a huge number of very successful companies.

> C++

Really? :(

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#46

Post by tgflynn » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

dfboyd wrote: post #36

I think this is just an IBM PR piece. It ticks all the boxes: quotes from IBM customers, quotes from IBM staff, mentions the "Master the Mainframe" contest. You can tell because when it says "mainframe" it doesn't mean "any large computer", it means "Something descended from the IBM 360".

Yes, because that's what the word "mainframe" means today, simply because all other machine architectures that were considered mainframes are now extinct.

I'm not saying it's not IBM PR, though.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#47

Post by chachachoney » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

vageli wrote: post #27

DebtDeflation wrote: post #3

The surge in demand is being driven almost entirely by state unemployment systems. Most of these systems haven't seen a surge in unemployment claims since the 2009 recession and haven't had to change the underlying rules governing eligibility in even longer. Once the systems are patched and/or the surge in new claims subsides, 90% of this sudden demand for "Cobalt programmers" will evaporate. It's one thing for retir…

> The surge in demand is being driven almost entirely by state unemployment systems. Most of these systems haven't seen a surge in unemployment claims since the 2009 recession and haven't had to change the underlying rules governing eligibility in even longer. Once the systems are patched and/or the surge in new claims subsides, 90% of this sudden demand for "Cobalt programmers" will evaporate. I generally agree but…

Is Cobalt an obscure dialect of Cobol?

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#48

Post by rtempaccount1 » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

scottlocklin wrote: post #28

rtempaccount1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a talk about mainframe security recently where the state of play with one company was, there were three users in their admins group for the mainframe, two had retired, and the third was past retirement age... When you combine retirements with decades of under-documented code doing critical functions, it's not a recipe for good long term success...

I dunno; rewriting it in some shit tier EC2 FunNewLang framework that changes every year doesn't sound like a recipe for long term success either. When I look at how mainframes work, and how "clouds" work, I wonder at how imbecilic IBM management (or one of their competitors) must have been to not capture that value in the first place.

There is a middle ground between those two extremes of course.

I'm not surprised at the mainframe's lack of success at all, the barriers to entry are extreme, meaning there's an inevitable lack of activity.

I've worked in environments which had mainframes deployed and even as an employee it was inordinately difficult to get any access to them.

Combine that with IBM's "enterprise" sales process and it's not a mystery that they lost the fight to attract newer systems...

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#49

Post by rtempaccount1 » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:59 PM UTC

analognoise wrote: post #26

Twisell wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same logic apply to climate change issues. There is little immediate reward so let this dumpster fire explode on our kids... It doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good logic. We desperately need more long term thinking.

Counterpoint: a system that runs for 20, 30, 40 years without any serious downtime is the definition of long term thinking.

except of course where the system is ossified and you can no longer make changes for fear of affecting that lack of downtime.

In the organizations I've seen with mainframes, what happened was a panoply of supporting systems sprung up where new requirements existed as everyone was afraid of making significant changes to the mainframe environment.

Re: Mainframes Are Having a Moment

#50

Post by Zenst » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

tgflynn wrote: post #44

Zenst wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000 "The VAX 9000, code named Aridus or Aquarius, was a family of supercomputer and mainframe computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA)."

I never heard of that model. I suspect it probably wasn't very successful because DEC started to move to the Alpha architecture not many years later. I worked with a lot of VAXen back in the day but I never heard anyone refer to them as "mainframes".

Aye, not common and for many will be a surprise as mention VAX and the DecVAX workstations and as you say, midrange setups spring to mind. I did some C work upon them late 80's and was very impressed and some profiling tool that was a whole new experience of joy.

Will add, you could win a lot of proposition bets that Dec made a VAX supercomputer.