Re: Getting Young People into IBM i

I was young, once.

I had a big advantage coming into the Midrange milieu. Maybe a few.

First, although my University (CSU Long Beach, Class of 1985) was a CDC Cyber/DEC PDP-11 shop, and the only IBM product I used there was a first-generation IBM-PC, for one class (an experimental game-writing class), my two years of *high school* programming were on an IBM 370/135 (running, as I've said before, McGill University MUSIC). And while all student terminals were simple ASCII, nothing smarter than a Lear ADM-1, all running through a front-end processor (something called a CC8), *I knew what EBCDIC was, had at least read about 3270 data stream terminals, and understood the IBM approach to timesharing.* (Indeed, being used to the IBM approach, with long, variable-length timeslices, and offloading async terminals to front-end processors, I found the non-IBM approach of sub-second timeslices, host-echo, and so forth to be, if you'll pardon my Yiddish, meshuga.)

And when I *did* move on to the University (already fluent in two dialects of BASIC, and learning FORTRAN IV), almost everything was taught on mainframes, with terminals (mostly Teleray 10s), and I made it my business to learn even more programming languages than were required for my degree, ending up also fluent in Pascal, COBOL, PL/I, PDP-11 Assembler, and (LISP). And knowing how to write a recursive-descent parser. And I'd already found the biggest flaw in Niklaus Wirth's understanding (at least as of when he designed Pascal) of structured programming theory: you *don't* always *want* a FOR loop to run to completion.

I suspect that a major problem with kids today is that they're taught everything in only one or two languages, and all of it on desktop systems. And I think we all know the old saw about what happens when the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer.

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JHHL