Working on big iron, I get to work with assembler, CICS, MQ Series, and DB2 in addition to COBOL. No, it's not flashy like web apps, but there's a certain appea

Working on big iron, I get to work with assembler, CICS, MQ Series, and DB2 in addition to COBOL. No, it's not flashy like web apps, but there's a certain appeal to bit-diddlers like myself. Perhaps it's the same as the difference between driving a PT boat and working in the engine room of an aircraft carrier. I would choose the carrier. Also, Greenspun's Tenth Rule is in effect in the COBOL world as much as in any other language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_Tenth_Rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_Tenth_Rule The difference in the COBOL world is that you are more likely to work with people who would not know what you are talking about if you mentioned Lisp or Greenspun's Rule, or even the word "predicate" just to pick an unrelated example. So if you are into programming more than you are into business, you can function in the mainframe world as a sort of playground for exercising your programming muscle in ways that suit you, even if your colleagues aren't aware that something different is going on. For instance, I generate a lot of code using a Common Lisp system I wrote for my own use. No one knows or cares--all they know is they seem to get reliable code from me very quickly. If I suggested that more people use the Lisp code generator, it would not fly because it would require training and might cost maintenance dollars. So it remains a personal tool. More: My job involves a weekly task to analyze a release while it is under development. My predecessor did this manually and took all week. I wrote a Java/MySQL system to do it, and it takes me all of 10 minutes a week. Another win for the intrepid programmer. More out in the open, I recently led development of a rules-based system. The team did not speak rules, evaluation, predicates, or the general use of collections. The challenge for me was to design the system using these concepts, then present it to developers who will never want to learn the general concepts. Done in record time, by some mysterious process (I broke the design into small pieces w/o reference to the comp sci terms, gave each developer a focused task, and tied it all together myself). Definitely more Sears foundation garment than Frederick's of Hollywood, but I like it.