Re: [IBMiOSS] Unixese vs IBMiese (Was gmake: *** virtual memory exhausted. Stop.)

"That's mainly an issue of familiarity, though. Listening to IBM i people talk shop is just as arcane-sounding to outsiders, I can assure you.”

Of course it is.

But the point surely is that if OS is to take hold then it is exactly that group of people who have to understand it!! And that is where I think IBM needs some focus.

As to tooling yes - it is removing the need for OS knowledge. The term “Unixese” really has nothing to do with the Unix OS per-se but rather the rather strange dialect of English in which they speak.

To an audience that has grown up with commands etc. that follow a pattern that is comprehensible e.g. WRK (Work) OBJ (Objects) PDM (PDM) there is a huge gap to bridge to get to grips with terms such as grep, bourne shell, or better yet bash, awk, git, etc. etc. All of which are mostly meaningless. Add to that that each new thing such as Node.js brings along its own little list of stuff like npm (which to me means New Program Model) and you have a problem.

People often bemoan the fact that so little use is made of PASE but never seem to think that perhaps there is a reason. The only people I know who have really tried to make sense of it at all are Scott and Ted (Holt) neither of whom are much involved in this new stuff.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

On Jul 13, 2016, at 10:11 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 6:33 PM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"So, I get the thrust of what Tony is saying, but I also want to reassure open source newbies that you don't HAVE to know C to participate fruitfully in open source.”

I on the other agree fully with Tony _except_ I would replace “C” with “Unixese” - I do know some C but have rarely found it necessary to utilizing OS software. However the fact that everything is described in assorted sub-dialects of Unixese _is_ a major inhibitor.

It definitely helps to have some Unix background. But the necessity of
that is eroding as well, for similar reasons that it is for C. People
keep coming up with tools that make the underlying operating system
less and less relevant, at least for a large class of tasks/problems,
for the simple reason that making things more accessible is a net win.
For everyone, not just C gurus or Unix gurus.

I try to follow some of the conversations on this list and frankly it is putting me off trying a lot of the stuff. Take an extract from one of the recent discussions on this list:

That's mainly an issue of familiarity, though. Listening to IBM i
people talk shop is just as arcane-sounding to outsiders, I can assure
you.

I will say that the most arcane-sounding Unix stuff has to do more
with configuration and building low-level tools and less to do with
application-level programming; and this is EXACTLY the same situation
in the IBM i world.

I have always known, and continue to be reminded of every day, that I
am a programmer and not a system administrator. There are some people
who can manage to be both, but you absolutely do not have to do both
to make a meaningful contribution.

John Y.
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