Re: Getting Young People into IBM i

Hello:
"I suspect that a major problem with kids today is that they're taughteverything in only one or two languages, and all of it on desktop
systems."
This isn't true at all.  I know from the recent student meet and greets organized the students are coming out of school with a variety of programming languages:   RPG, PHP, C++, ,Net, node.js, Phyton, HTML, javascript, Java, SQL.  Can't say that I've seen any school teaching Cobol though.   Most students that I know use laptops.
Regards,Laura



Laura Ubelhor

President


Consultech Services, Inc.

Office: (248) 628-6800 

ubelhor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx | www.consultechservicesinc.com


On Thursday, May 11, 2023 at 11:53:50 AM EDT, James H. H. Lampert via MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

--
JHHL