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On Jul 25, 2025, at 5:38 PM, x y <xy6581@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:--
IMO, Patrik's explanation is exactly right. IIRC, there was a
one-off language used to develop System/38's CPF and utilities; it
would make sense that SDA was built using that tooling. With the move
to RISC and the great emphasis on secure software, it's likely parts
of the SDA app would not get through a code review or a systems
assurance test today. Hence, IBM's trying to kill SDA because key components are borderline unusable.
Meanwhile, IBM is whistling by the graveyard hoping thousands of
customers and applications developers don't miss it.
But here's one big problem with Patrik's scenario: why hasn't SEU been
end-of-life'd? It likely uses the same development framework and one
would think it suffers from the same ailments as SDA. SDA appears to
be the stalking horse to gauge customer reaction to killing off ADTS and PDM.
Hey IBM: how about inviting a couple of user Big Brains, folks with no
IBM history as an employee or contractor, to your dev locations and
show them what tools you use in your labs? That would pull back the
kimono a bit but it ignores one area: interactive development. Do you
have any apps other than SDA and SDA that use *DS4 mode? Interactive
app development is harder than you think; how many on the lab staff
have built and managed a real line-of-business application? A
tactical solution is to kill SDA in the expectation/hope/bet that a VS
Code plug-in will provide a better and cheaper solution but the
unintended consequence of that is leaving RDi and Merlin behind in favor of VS Code.
Some favoring euthanizing SDA and SEU point to the importance of
adopting modern development practices supported by modern development
tools. But conflation isn't the answer: great art--paintings,
shotguns, a garden, wooden boats, software applications--can be
created in humble surroundings with low-tech tools (one notable
exception: fancy web pages are essentially beyond human comprehension
and require a robust tool to keep track of everything). Applications
developed in a steel-and-glass monolith aren't inherently better but
there's no question that modern dev tools greatly aid the development
process. Colorizing tokens, RDi's CTRL+2, and RDi's ALT+Z provide
measurable productivity increases but they don't contribute directly to the product.
And that other thing about the OS being green-screen...well, yes.
What's notable about that truth is the lack of movement by IBM. That
suggests resources are directed to other areas. There are changes
coming and it's just a matter of time; IBM's Merlin may signal how we develop in the
future. Pardon me while I check my life expectancy chart.
On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 8:10 AM Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:--
Hello Gavin,
Am 25.07.2025 um 14:56 schrieb Gavin Inman <midrangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:eliminate 5250.
If you want to push your remaining dedicated base off a platform
IBM,
Matches my thinking. When I started exploring the system as a
retrocomputing hobbyist in 2007 and soon after found it extremely
easy to write full screen text UI applications — compared to Libcurses on Linux.
Sadly, TUIs are (outside of nerd niches) generally considered
outdated nowadays, and the limitations of the 5250 forms based
approach limits possible interactions with the user even further.
Everything has to be GUI and clickable, despite the fact that requested information is still text.
Mostly.
But then, I'm not a commercial user, and consider myself being part
of that nerd niche mentioned above.
:wq! PoC
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