Clay,
Welcome aboard. It will definitely be worth your efforts to learn those
languages. The business applications written in COBOL and RPG will still be
around after the folks who wrote them are gone. On top of being used to run
the business application programs, CL is also useful for automating a lot of
system administration processes.
You should definitely make a trip to Minneapolis in October.
http://www.systemideveloper.com/
Paul Nelson
Cell 708-670-6978
Office 512-392-2577
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Clay B Carley
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 10:06 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Recommendations for a newcomer?
Being new to midrange systems, I'm attempting to pick up skills that
will be useful for me in the future, in hopes to get a job working with
them. Reading articles that say things like COBOL is uncool, and RPG is
worse isn't really giving me hope for a future working with a midrange
system though.
Is it going to be worth my time to learn things like CL, COBOL, and RPG
now? Or are they fading away? It would be pretty sad to finally become
proficient with these languages, only to find out that they are dead and
replaced with <blah> instead.
What would you recommend a newcomer focus on (aside from system operations)?
Reading Rob's message from last week regarding "20 years of experience,
versus one year of experience repeated 20 times" looks like a pretty
good starting place I suppose. I'm really trying to look at where we're
going to be in the years to come, not necessarily tomorrow.
Thanks for any suggestions,
Clay Carley
midrange.com
