(Originally posted 2013-06-30.)
I’ll admit it: I have a dirty little secret. 🙂 All I can say is it was in my youth – and I didn’t know any better. 🙂
And folks I’m exclusively revealing my secret here in this blog… 🙂
I learned to program in BASIC. 🙂
Actually the “I didn’t know any better” bit is a lie: My Dad can attest to the fact he had Elsevier Computer Monographs in the house, which I read avidly. (Actually I added to the collection when at university and these books are among the few paper Computing books I still have.) And his view, which I think was the prevailing industry view, was that BASIC rots the brain and Algol is much better.
I don’t disagree about Algol being a superior language. I do disagree that BASIC teaches bad habits you can’t overcome. But you use the language you have available to express yourself. And, by learning enough languages or gaining experience, you develop programming maturity. (You’ll’ve guessed, I hope, that Algol wasn’t available to me.)
To be fair to the “BASIC is horrid” camp it is horrid 🙂 but I don’t think longitudinal studies had been conducted that proved it to be a stupefiant (great French word) 🙂 And, to my mind, getting people programming is more important: We can work on points of style later.
The next steps in my programming career (verb or noun?) 🙂 were Z80 Assembler, a dialect of OPAL, and CORAL. Again used in the “program in what’s available” mode.
I don’t think descending into Z80 Assembler (and actually, more interesting to me, machine code) did me any harm. And I found structured programming really quite easy to do – in OPAL and CORAL.
University saw FORTRAN, C, a functional programming language called SASL, Pascal, amongst others.
So, even before joining IBM, I’d seen a fair few programming languages.
This isn’t going to be a taxonomy of programming languages, you’ll be pleased to know.
Here’s an interesting one: A debugger for the Amstrad CPC–464 (I learnt Z80 Assembler on) allowed you to write macros in Forth. I loved it. “What a weird (reverse-Polish) language” you might say. But, and here’s the reason for mentioning it, it was the language that was available to do the job. And that’s a theme I’ll return to.
Now I’m coming to the point: This post, I think (sometimes I’m not so sure), came from conversations about programming languages on IBM-MAIN and further reflection on this blog post of mine.
I’d like to talk about why we chose the programming languages we do (or at least why I do).
- People talk about programming language design. And in Dragging REXX Into The 21st Century? I’m hinting at that – through my efforts to gain some elegance.
- Lots of people talk about efficiency – for example whether a good Assembler programmer can outstrip a COBOL compiler. (Yes over a short enough distance.) 🙂
- People have to choose from the palette of languages available. For example LISP for EMACS. Or whatever your installation has made available.
I think I’m in the third category with a nod to the first, and sometimes I’m forced to worry about efficiency. (Some of our tools wouldn’t be feasible without the tuning we’ve given them: CPU Time isn’t the factor, completing sometime before two years after hell freezes over is.) 🙂 So, for example:
- My mainframe programming is a mixture of Assembler and REXX – because the SMF-crunching code we use requires it. (And actually, in recent years, REXX driving GDDM has been a factor.)
- My stand-alone programming on the PC tends to be Python, though AppleScript on the Mac is a must – because it can drive the Evernote API, for example.
- My “web serving”, which is actually with the server and the client on the same (Linux) machine is Apache with PHP. This pumps out javascript (mostly Dojo for the UI elements). This is a fairly natural choice – and is much better than trying to build a GUI in some native language. The PHP code also automates a lot of FTP gets from the mainframe – textual reports (actually Bookmaster script) and graphics.
It’s horses for courses, and I won’t swear I’ve necessarily made the right choices. But each of these have magical superpowers because of the environment they run in and libraries/built-ins they come with.
A while back someone “threatened” me with having to learn SAS. My response was along the lines of “bring it on, as it’ll be about the 20th language I’ll’ve become familiar with.” I guess that makes me a geek. 🙂
Or maybe a nerd. 🙂
I guess it also explains why this blog contains as much programming as it does. I’m thinking of renaming it to [“Mainframe”,“Performance”,“Topics”]. 🙂
The discussion in IBM-MAIN and ruminating about Dragging REXX Into The 21st Century? got me thinking about how fit languages are for the future, and REXX in particular.
I’d say “don’t expect the REXX language to evolve”, whether IBM ports [http://www.oorexx.org](Open Object Rexx) to z/OS or not. (I seriously doubt it will, by the way.) But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad language to write new stuff in. It’s worth noting that if you have, for example, ISPF applications to write it’s still a good language to do it in.
One of the strengths that I think also helps is REXX’s ability to embed host commands. So, for example, if somebody wrote an XML DOM Tree parser set of commands REXX could script it. (If this sounds like what javascript does with, for example, getElementById(), it should.) So the complaint on IBM-MAIN that REXX doesn’t do XML could be solved – with a few 🙂 lines of code.
Another is BPXWUNIX – which I’ve mentioned many times in this blog. It allows you to use all the Unix functionality z/OS offers.
One thing I’d admit we lack on z/OS is support for some thumpingly good modern programming languages – Python, node.js and (recent) PHP being but three. And I mention this here because of why:
- I’m not so worried about the expressiveness etc of the languages we have. We can program just fine with what we have.
- I’d like to see more commercial packages ported. These have their own prerequisites when it comes to environments and languages. For example MediaWiki is written in PHP.
So there you are, some stray thoughts on programming languages – on a gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon. And if the tone got tetchier (not techier) 🙂 as you go through it’s because I sat down to write in stages after pulling tall stinging nettles out in the garden. (In provably pessimal 🙂 shorts and t-shirt.) And it’s a well-known fact (to those who know it well)[1] 🙂 that everyone in the UK thinks their garden’s stinging nettles are the most potent in the world. 🙂
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Thank you Robert Rankin :-). ↩
Mainframe, Performance, Topics 