5 ms·

One thing I really miss from mainframes is their stability. Case a) Lots of years ago IBM changed CPU architecture on their System i. Every program we made was

One thing I really miss from mainframes is their stability. Case a) Lots of years ago IBM changed CPU architecture on their System i. Every program we made was transparently recompiled to the new instruction set on first run, and just worked after that. Case b) Legacy technologies are taken very seriously. Decades old programs made in obsolete versions of COBOL can still be compiled without issues on the modern systems. No unexpected side effects, no new bugs, it just works. It provides a comfortable path to gradual upgrade. Case c) The tech stack builds upon itself, which means you can devote years to learn the stack and still enjoy the fruits of your effort for decades. You just have to keep up with the changes, not relearn everything every five years. Case d) The manuals and reference are exhaustive and absolutely superb, you can become an expert just by reading them. How many questions about mainframe development are created daily in Stack Overflow? Their biggest drawback is their cost. Mainframe as a Service exist, but it needs to be affordable enough to run cheap experiments, otherwise it won't be attractive to startups.

oneplane 7y ago
The biggest drawback is that it's inflexible, slow to work on and pretty much the definition of proprietary. Everything is a secret, everything has as much red tape as a lawyers office and nobody wants to share.
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  Slow to work on? Oh no, you didn't. I'd even contest it's more productive, as the developments tools come preinstalled and they integrate seamlessly with the platform. It isn't as flexible as a PC, but you shouldn't expect it to. You learn the design, conventions and idiosyncrasy of the platform and work with them, not against them.
  - oneplane 7y ago
    Slow as in you can't do as many release cycles on it as say, a distributed cluster. We're hosting about 700 services with about 6 instances each and release each of them multiple times a day. That's about 4000 production releases a day with no downtime, errors, or security issues. Includes rollbacks, roll forwards, AB-tests, versioned releases etc. No mainframes anymore either, and for 10% of the cost. Maybe this isn't the general standard, or maybe this wouldn't work for multinationals or companies/workforces with different values, but it works here. I suppose it also depends on what your company is doing; we're in fast moving online retail, if you are in a slower operating environment (i.e. only doing batch processing or bulk messaging with ETL of different kinds) where changes aren't giving you an edge over competition if must be a different set of operational requirements too.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  the iSeries or just mainframes in general? Certainly not the i. There is so much documentation that it might be more of an issue of it being overwhelming. there are multiple active communities sharing code. this is a system which is based on DB2 meaning SQL in native, development tools are varied, from COBOL, RPGLE, JAVA, and more. You can web face nearly any existing process, node.js work is one area we have lots of current work. no down time for reorganizing files, indexes always maintained, and tools open to all on the platform to optimize sql statements. I have developers using all this and more. most use an eclipse based platform (RDi for Cobol/RPGLE) or eclipse itself to work. admin wise it is a breeze, no need to hunt down a tcp/ip stack, db tools, schedulers, or such. its all built in. Legacy systems are only limited by the imagination of those using them. the reason the systems persist and grow is because they are not frozen in time and their architecture readily adapts to new technology because they were designed to not be locked down with an inflexible design.
derekp7 7y ago
This is actually one of my favorite things about Linux. I learned Unix back around 1989, using IBM AIX. The AT&T books (blue star-field covers) were mostly applicable (except for IBM specific items), and everything I learned then I'm still putting to good use today on modern Linux systems. Printing has improved somewhat, disk storage a bit more, and of course my favorite, the /proc file system. But all my shell, awk, sed, grep, sort, join, vi commands still work as expected. I even had something similar to gnu screen, called VTCS (virtual terminal control system), but I wasn't on the Internet at the time so I never released it. Would love to dig up the source code for that again though.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Right. And with open source software decades old programs can be compiled without issues too using last known good compilers, toolchains, libraries, preserving all the old bugs and vulnerabilities, just like on mainframes, but for free. So everything he misses is there. It's just that running legacy code is too risky these days unless you are completely isolated from the internet. And modern infrastructure has a lot more essential complexity.
  - butteroverflow 7y ago
    Yeah. Here's a GCC developer experimenting with a 31-year old GCC version on a modern system (the first one with x86 support): >It is amazing how well things work – the modern assembler, linker, and debugger handles the code generated by GCC 1.27 without any problems. https://kristerw.blogspot.com/2019/01/building-gcc-127.html https://kristerw.blogspot.com/2019/01/building-gcc-127.html And the write-up he based his experiments upon: https://miyuki.github.io/2017/10/04/gcc-archaeology-1.html https://miyuki.github.io/2017/10/04/gcc-archaeology-1.html I'd say this kind of source-based backwards compatibility is superior to what's happening in Windows world -- not only it encourages you to keep the source code open, but you also don't have to keep as many hacks in the kernel/system libraries.
zdw 7y ago
Case C) also applies to the standard *nix toolset. Learning `vi` in 1979 then using it for 40 years seems like a good return on investment. Both would also be examples of survivorship bias.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  It was fairly evident to me by the mid 1990s that Unix likely had staying power over other. options -- VMS, MVS, Mac (pre-OSX), and Windows. And yes, I'd worked on all of those, plus a few others.
empath75 7y ago
> The tech stack builds upon itself, which means you can devote years to learn the stack and still enjoy the fruits of your effort for decades. You just have to keep up with the changes, not relearn everything every five years. Then you get laid off at 50 and have no hope of finding another job at the same salary.
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  Anecdata: I'm more used to see senior mainframe people change jobs than be laid off. The pay is not that higher compared to other platforms, so maybe that softens the temptation to save on salaries.
hyperpallium 7y ago
Excepting price, Java has similar characteristics, for good or ill.
msh 7y ago
That kind of backward compatiblity is very expensive and for people using servers not worth it for stability.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

oneplane 7y ago

The biggest drawback is that it's inflexible, slow to work on and pretty much the definition of proprietary. Everything is a secret, everything has as much red tape as a lawyers office and nobody wants to share.

ASalazarMX 7y ago
Slow to work on? Oh no, you didn't. I'd even contest it's more productive, as the developments tools come preinstalled and they integrate seamlessly with the platform. It isn't as flexible as a PC, but you shouldn't expect it to. You learn the design, conventions and idiosyncrasy of the platform and work with them, not against them.
- oneplane 7y ago
  Slow as in you can't do as many release cycles on it as say, a distributed cluster. We're hosting about 700 services with about 6 instances each and release each of them multiple times a day. That's about 4000 production releases a day with no downtime, errors, or security issues. Includes rollbacks, roll forwards, AB-tests, versioned releases etc. No mainframes anymore either, and for 10% of the cost. Maybe this isn't the general standard, or maybe this wouldn't work for multinationals or companies/workforces with different values, but it works here. I suppose it also depends on what your company is doing; we're in fast moving online retail, if you are in a slower operating environment (i.e. only doing batch processing or bulk messaging with ETL of different kinds) where changes aren't giving you an edge over competition if must be a different set of operational requirements too.
Shivetya 7y ago
the iSeries or just mainframes in general? Certainly not the i. There is so much documentation that it might be more of an issue of it being overwhelming. there are multiple active communities sharing code. this is a system which is based on DB2 meaning SQL in native, development tools are varied, from COBOL, RPGLE, JAVA, and more. You can web face nearly any existing process, node.js work is one area we have lots of current work. no down time for reorganizing files, indexes always maintained, and tools open to all on the platform to optimize sql statements. I have developers using all this and more. most use an eclipse based platform (RDi for Cobol/RPGLE) or eclipse itself to work. admin wise it is a breeze, no need to hunt down a tcp/ip stack, db tools, schedulers, or such. its all built in. Legacy systems are only limited by the imagination of those using them. the reason the systems persist and grow is because they are not frozen in time and their architecture readily adapts to new technology because they were designed to not be locked down with an inflexible design.

derekp7 7y ago

This is actually one of my favorite things about Linux. I learned Unix back around 1989, using IBM AIX. The AT&T books (blue star-field covers) were mostly applicable (except for IBM specific items), and everything I learned then I'm still putting to good use today on modern Linux systems. Printing has improved somewhat, disk storage a bit more, and of course my favorite, the /proc file system. But all my shell, awk, sed, grep, sort, join, vi commands still work as expected. I even had something similar to gnu screen, called VTCS (virtual terminal control system), but I wasn't on the Internet at the time so I never released it. Would love to dig up the source code for that again though.

zzzcpan 7y ago
Right. And with open source software decades old programs can be compiled without issues too using last known good compilers, toolchains, libraries, preserving all the old bugs and vulnerabilities, just like on mainframes, but for free. So everything he misses is there. It's just that running legacy code is too risky these days unless you are completely isolated from the internet. And modern infrastructure has a lot more essential complexity.
- butteroverflow 7y ago
  Yeah. Here's a GCC developer experimenting with a 31-year old GCC version on a modern system (the first one with x86 support): >It is amazing how well things work – the modern assembler, linker, and debugger handles the code generated by GCC 1.27 without any problems. https://kristerw.blogspot.com/2019/01/building-gcc-127.html https://kristerw.blogspot.com/2019/01/building-gcc-127.html And the write-up he based his experiments upon: https://miyuki.github.io/2017/10/04/gcc-archaeology-1.html https://miyuki.github.io/2017/10/04/gcc-archaeology-1.html I'd say this kind of source-based backwards compatibility is superior to what's happening in Windows world -- not only it encourages you to keep the source code open, but you also don't have to keep as many hacks in the kernel/system libraries.

zdw 7y ago

Case C) also applies to the standard *nix toolset. Learning `vi` in 1979 then using it for 40 years seems like a good return on investment. Both would also be examples of survivorship bias.

dredmorbius 7y ago
It was fairly evident to me by the mid 1990s that Unix likely had staying power over other. options -- VMS, MVS, Mac (pre-OSX), and Windows. And yes, I'd worked on all of those, plus a few others.

empath75 7y ago

> The tech stack builds upon itself, which means you can devote years to learn the stack and still enjoy the fruits of your effort for decades. You just have to keep up with the changes, not relearn everything every five years. Then you get laid off at 50 and have no hope of finding another job at the same salary.

ASalazarMX 7y ago
Anecdata: I'm more used to see senior mainframe people change jobs than be laid off. The pay is not that higher compared to other platforms, so maybe that softens the temptation to save on salaries.

hyperpallium 7y ago

Excepting price, Java has similar characteristics, for good or ill.

msh 7y ago

That kind of backward compatiblity is very expensive and for people using servers not worth it for stability.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]