4 ms·
"Continuous development" on the mainframe? Hah! My first job out of university in 1996 was doing COBOL programming on mainframes for the federal government of
by jbarham 16y ago
"Continuous development" on the mainframe? Hah!
My first job out of university in 1996 was doing COBOL programming on mainframes for the federal government of Canada, and my first project was to rewrite a program originally written in 1972 that had changed very little since then. I have little doubt that after almost 15 years my rewrite is still much the same.
Anyway, I quickly realized that the mainframe environment doesn't exactly foster technical innovation so I moved on and am quite happy to have not sat in front a "green screen" in over a decade.
- mweatherill 16y agoYour experience is with an application running on a mainframe and is probably typical. The OP was referring to the OS itself which is continuously developed with fanatical dedication to backwards compatibility.
- Someone 16y agoThat "fanatical dedication to backwards compatibility" works even harder towards glacial development for the OS than for applications. Or do you think OS developers will ship a new, faster scheduler, tweak the memory allocator and the thread scheduler every month?
- rbanffy 16y agoPlus, you won't get five nines reliability if you tweak the kernel every week. Mainframes are built to never stop, to never give you a headache and to never, ever surprise you.