worth learning f#?

[expat]

Old 'John Von' must must be laughing his ethereal socks off.

Fact is, except for very narrow, specialist and real-time processing jobs, Von Neumann's architecture has seen us through more than half a century of computerised data processing.

It just works.

On the subject of UNIX. UNIX and its derivatives have always been the 'also-ran' in every major IT sector, ever since its inception.

Don't get me wrong, I quite like UNIX, but it hasn't ever set the world alight or transformed the industry like MVS, VMS or even MS-DOS and Windows did.

It's always there in the background, hanging on by its badly bitten fingernails.

Yeah but....
MVS was astounding.
VMS I don't know.
MS-DOS was a good idea for its time.
Windows, we owe it everything. But...

I am so happy not to be using Windows any more on my own computer. And ISTM that the security and stability of OSX comes from the fact that it is unix. It's an ancient invention that just won't quit (like the Porsche 911, Kodachrome -oops...)

Or is it that OSX, like MVS, is only used on systems that are largely under the OS vendor's control?



What else would you run your personal computer on? You've got Windows, unix/linux/Mac, and that's it, no? I mean, you can't download MVS and run your laptop on that, can you?

Are there any sensible (or even imaginative) alternative in view for the personal computer?

[bogeyman]

Yeah but....
MVS was astounding.
VMS I don't know.
MS-DOS was a good idea for its time.
Windows, we owe it everything. But...

My personal choice of dev os is Apple's OS X - with assistance from VMWare's rather excellent Fusion product, if I need to run various versions/configs of Windows, or Linux, or whatever.

You can actually run an emulated MVS if you need to under Windows (or Fusion), but last time I looked, it didn't emulate any 'real-world' stuff like VSAM file access methods, or network access methods like VTAM. It's ok for basic, syntactical and functional debugging of s/3x0 assembler, but that's about it.

VMS was a great little OS, from Digital Equipment Corp. Much smaller and simpler than IBM's MVS (which was a heavyweight batch system), but a good, well designed and flexible, semi-interactive OS for minis.

Dave Cutler was a lead designer of VMS and went on to create Windows NT.

[expat]

My personal choice of dev os is Apple's OS X - with assistance from VMWare's rather excellent Fusion product, if I need to run various versions/configs of Windows, or Linux, or whatever.

You can actually run an emulated MVS if you need to under Windows (or Fusion), but last time I looked, it didn't emulate any 'real-world' stuff like VSAM file access methods, or network access methods like VTAM. It's ok for basic, syntactical and functional debugging of s/3x0 assembler, but that's about it.

VMS was a great little OS, from Digital Equipment Corp. Much smaller and simpler than IBM's MVS (which was a heavyweight batch system), but a good, well designed and flexible, semi-interactive OS for minis.

Dave Cutler was a lead designer of VMS and went on to create Windows NT.

I'm pretty ignorant here but ISTM that NT was an oasis of stability, for a Windows system. But that was then.

I have heard of MVS emulators but Why? apart from as you say debugging code.

As for a non-dev user, isn't the old advice still good? Look at what you want to do, identify the programs that do that, then get the OS and the computer that will run them. But for me and most of us I'd say that's Wintel, Mac, or Linux. Any one will do. And nothing else will. So it's boring.

[bogeyman]

I'm pretty ignorant here but ISTM that NT was an oasis of stability, for a Windows system. But that was then.

I have heard of MVS emulators but Why? apart from as you say debugging code.

As for a non-dev user, isn't the old advice still good? Look at what you want to do, identify the programs that do that, then get the OS and the computer that will run them. But for me and most of us I'd say that's Wintel, Mac, or Linux. Any one will do. And nothing else will. So it's boring.

Yes, absolutely. That's why I use OS X. I can do native OS X dev, Windows dev, multiple flavours of *nix dev or even MVS dev (to a limited extent).

Short of installing a second-hand IBM 3090-4 Sysplex in my basement, a freeware MVS emulator is probably the best deal for me as an occasional MVS systems-programmer/developer.

[mailric]

you can't play without F#

[bogeyman]

you can't play without F#

Depends on what scale.

[mailric]

Depends on what scale.

on a large scale...

[Platypus]

On the subject of UNIX. UNIX and its derivatives have always been the 'also-ran' in every major IT sector, ever since its inception.

Don't get me wrong, I quite like UNIX, but it hasn't ever set the world alight or transformed the industry like MVS, VMS or even MS-DOS and Windows did.

I think you may underestimate the number of UNIX servers there are out there. In my role I see lots of companies with thousands of multi-processor servers running UNIX.

[vetran]

UNIX may be a plague but its a very effective one.

Many years ago we took an Oracle Db off a large UNIX box (5 years old\) and popped it on an NT box, a sub second search on the aging UNIX box took 10 minutes on NT.

Freebsd (OSX's daddy) was the most common webserver 10 years ago.

[darmstadt]

Short of installing a second-hand IBM 3090-4 Sysplex in my basement, a freeware MVS emulator is probably the best deal for me as an occasional MVS systems-programmer/developer.

Hercules is a freeware MVS emulator which runs all of IBMs mainframe operating systems. The trouble is you can't get licenses to run the newest versions (although I know a lot of people who do run them, including at least one very big company.) You can run MVS 3.8j and VM/370 on it for free though but it ain't brilliant. I provide support for a non-free emulator in EMEA (Flex-ES) but that is currently very quiet due to patent disputes with big blue. There used to be UMX (who I also worked for) but went titsup and there are other emulators but due to NDAs I can't talk about it...