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You might be pleased to hear Fred Brooks apologised for JCL in 2015:[1] > If we had been smart, we would also have done a schedule-time mode of PL/I instead of
by edward-h 8y ago
You might be pleased to hear Fred Brooks apologised for JCL in 2015:[1]
> If we had been smart, we would also have done a schedule-time mode of PL/I instead of doing JCL, the Job Control Language. But we weren’t smart. The worst mistake we made was JCL. Its existence was a mistake. Building it on a card format was a mistake. Building it on assembly language was a mistake. Thinking of it as only six little control cards instead of a language was a mistake, because it had no proper subroutine facilities, no proper branching facilities. That we did not see it as a language was the fundamental problem; we saw it as a set of control cards.
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/11/193333-an-interview-with-fred-brooks/abstract https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/11/193333-an-interview-w...
- gwern 8y agoThe full interview is at https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/11/102658255-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... ; I've mirrored the ACM excerpts at https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2015-brooks.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2015-brooks.pdf
- graycat 8y agoThank you; thank you; thank you. There he really nailed the problems with JCL. Once at the Watson lab I rode in the elevator with Brooks and nearly kissed his ring for his The Mythical Man-Month but was nice enough not to mention JCL!