[TriLUG] The thin line...

[Andrew Ball]

Believe it or not, Cobol (in more recent incarnations, with plus signs and
xml parsers among other cool new features 8-) ) remains very important
for financial institutions.  And there's a huge shortage of people with
MVS and Cobol skills.  I had a pretty fun job playing with enterprise
transformation tools that slurped Cobol CICS transactions into web
services.

That said, Cobol isn't going to do system administratrion so well :-)  Rexx
may have been the original perl-like thing, but I haven't seen it outside
of IBM and like python better.

Peace.
Andrew

On 03 Oct 2006 23:22:56 -0400, Jon Carnes <jonc at nc.rr.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 16:48, Rick DeNatale wrote:
> > I know that we've got members who consider themselves sysadmins, and
> > others who consider themselves programmers.
> >
> > I'm curious about how much overlap in tools there is between these two
> > self-perceptions.
> >
> > So for the sysadmins among us how many of you are using any of the
> > following to do sysadmin tasks.  I'm talking here about managing your
> > scripts and configuration files, not using these tools to get or
> > install software from source:
> >
> Cleaning up my old mail...
>
> I wear both hats at FeatureTel, though I'm trying to pass on the
> Sysadmin hat to my good friend Jaimie. He has the skills, but his head
> just isn't big enough yet :-)
>
>
> > 1) make (or less likely perhaps, ant or rake)
> I use make a lot, but then most of the apps I run have to be pretty
> close to the cutting edge - and I have to customize a lot.
>
> > 2) A configuration management/repository system like cvs or subversion.
> We'll probably get around to this once we hire on some *real*
> developers, but for now I just hack and burn and script both the hacking
> and the burning...
>
> >
> > And on a scale of 0 (don't use it at all) through 1 (pure programming
> > language) to 10 (pure scripting language) where do you put your use of
> > these languages?
> >
> >     bash or your favorite shell
> Bash is the stuff man!
> When I'm wearing the Sysadmin hat I give this an 8.
> When I'm wearing my programming hat, I give it a 2.
> Scripting is often a fast easy way to massage data into reports, but
> it's slower and not as easily formated as a real programming tools (like
> Python). But Bash is THE tool when you have to hack through a million
> lines of log output to find the one or two valid g-nuggets of info you
> need.
>
> >     perl
> Perl was an early crush of mine, I thought I would love it forever...
> but then I discovered Python. :-)
> 0.1
>
> >     python
> Python is the true love of my life. When I'm wearing my programming hat
> (and not hacking out new Asterisk modules), I'm programming in Python. I
> give it an 8.
> As for Sysadmin... It comes in handy to customize some apps and even to
> write some of our own system monitoring tools. but it gets a 1 here.
>
> >     ruby
> No ruby slippers for me...  I haven't found a need for it yet, but then
> I'm not writing integrated apps for mass production. 0
>
> >     php
> On the sysadmin side, I hack it when I have to - but mostly I just use
> Python even for HTTP apps.  I give it 0.2
>
> >     c(++)
> It's so lovely to hack Kernel code (in Cent OS 4.3), and for customizing
> Asterisk. I give this a 2 (on my Programming side)
> 0 for my sysadmin side.
>
> >     COBOL <G>
> Just for grins I assume. Unlike Aaron, I *am* a geezer. I remember when
> Cobol was big (twice)... and Fortran too. I'm sure there is still some
> money to be made by folks who want to go that route... but I bet you
> won't find *any* of those folks on this list! :-)
>
> Take care!
>
> Jon Carnes
>
>
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>


-- 
=======================
Andrew D. Ball
anball at gmail.com
http://filebox.vt.edu/~anball1/
"Festina lente" $\approx$ "Make haste slowly"
    -- Caesar Augustus