z/OS user friendliness (was: Matching a set of characters in a string)

[Phil Smith III]

Lindy Mayfield wrote:
>Why? Why does it need to be more friendly?

Because for the survival of the platform, new folks need to be able to use
it. And z/OS is amazingly user-hostile; even *ix command-line mode is far
friendlier (and thus easier to learn). z/OS seems to be proudly stuck in the
1960s. And that means that newbies tend to run screaming from the room.

Linux on z, z/VM -- far easier to learn to be productive.

No, you don't want The Great Unwashed logging onto z/OS and mucking with
things. But that doesn't mean that it can't be made easier. Things as simple
as ISPF 3.4 remembering the sort order across a REFRESH command (to name a
tiny, tiny nit) should have been added decades ago. Meaningful, helpful
error messages (ok, this is definitely an area where *ix is even worse!). I
could go on, but the point is, new blood doesn't have the luxury of taking a
year to become productive. Nor should they need to.

...phsiii

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[Lindy Mayfield]

This could go round and round, but so far it is fun.

C++ made me run screaming from the room. I know I am comparing a bit extreme, but as a computer professional we just suck it up and learn it. I saw that stupid Eclipse cobol thing at an IBM conference like a bunch of years ago (when they found the bomb in Dresden) and I just felt, weird.

I'm a newbie compared to you guys, but my attitude is that if I need it to do my job, I just learn it and do it.

Anyone who complains about the "interface" is just ... [fill in the sarcastic blanks]

To make something more productive for a comuter professional makes sense. But to complain that JCL is too difficult for that person is just [more sarcastic blubberish]

Lindy
________________________________________
From: TSO REXX Discussion List [TSO-...@VM.MARIST.EDU] on behalf of Phil Smith III [li...@AKPHS.COM]
Sent: 08 October 2012 18:07
To: TSO-...@VM.MARIST.EDU
Subject: [TSO-REXX] z/OS user friendliness (was: Matching a set of characters in a string)

Lindy Mayfield wrote:
>Why? Why does it need to be more friendly?

Because for the survival of the platform, new folks need to be able to use
it. And z/OS is amazingly user-hostile; even *ix command-line mode is far
friendlier (and thus easier to learn). z/OS seems to be proudly stuck in the
1960s. And that means that newbies tend to run screaming from the room.

[Adrian Stern]

Although I'm no fan of MS, they have a visual batch tool that simplifies the
job 1000-fold. I think if I ever get back on the main-frame that's going to
be my next utility.

I wrote a REXX to add comments to a file in the editor explaining the
meaning of the condition codes for each step in English - nobody ever wanted
it but at that facility I couldn't safely make changes without it - that's
the kind of user hostility we're talking about

[Phil Smith III]

Lindy Mayfield wrote:
>This could go round and round, but so far it is fun.

>C++ made me run screaming from the room. I know I am comparing a bit
extreme, but as a computer professional we just suck it up and learn it. I
saw that stupid Eclipse cobol thing at an IBM conference like a bunch of
years ago (when they found the bomb in Dresden) and I just felt, weird.

>I'm a newbie compared to you guys, but my attitude is that if I need it to
do my job, I just learn it and do it.

>Anyone who complains about the "interface" is just ... [fill in the
sarcastic blanks]

>To make something more productive for a comuter professional makes sense.
But to complain that JCL is too difficult for that person is just [more
sarcastic blubberish]

I was with you until the last graf, which is contradictory: "user-friendly"
implies "more productive". It doesn't mean wallpaper and gadgets; that's
window dressing/glitz.

JCL is a good example: it's not that JCL is that hard, it's that the errors
it produces tend to be pretty opaque. Yes, you learn to read them; but why
can't they just be clear in the first place? Sure, some probably can't, but
there doesn't appear to be any effort to make them clearer. Again, this
isn't 1964: we have gigabytes of memory and thousands of MIPS. Spending a
few cycles to build and output a coherent message in an error path isn't a
big deal.

Here's a trivial example:
IEF212I NOPGM RUN STEPLIB +002 - DATA SET NOT FOUND

What data set? Why not tell me there? Yes, of course the information is
available in the JCL, but why waste my time going back to the JCL/JESJCL
output? Error diagnosis typically means looking in several places to
correlate the bread crumbs. It's kind of fun when you have the time, but
when you're under the gun, it's just irritating and unproductive.

At SHARE, IBM keeps talking about z/OSMF and GUI-izing system administration
tasks. What they don't seem to be getting is that 99% of the work on a z/OS
isn't the administration, and that's where the user-friendliness needs to
be. Nobody runs z/OS so they can employ sysprogs: they run z/OS so they can
run applications, and those require applications programmers. Given a choice
between Visual Studio and ISPF, most folks under 40 (maybe 50?) will choose
the former every time. So that's the market they need to woo. Yes, system
administration on z/OS is difficult (another pet peeve: SETPROG
APF,ADD,DSN=whatever,VOLSER=xxxxxx can't be bothered to say "Dude, I did it,
but that dataset doesn't exist" -- why not? How hard would that be?), but
you don't even need it if you don't have folks running applications there,
eh?

I could go on but...

...phsiii

[Dave Salt]

>Lindy Mayfield wrote:
>Why? Why does it need to be more friendly?

I know a large company that hires many new people each year, and they used to have a one week in-house training course introducing new mainframe users to ISPF. The course ran twice a year, with about 22 students in each class. That's 44 weeks of training, which is about 1760 hours. If each student costs the company $50 an hour (salary + benefits etc.), this means it costs the company about $88,000 a year to run the course. If you add in the cost of the teacher and premises, it's easily over $90,000.

That same company cut their classroom training in half (i.e. from five days to two and a half days) by bringing in SimpList. This resulted in a saving of $45,000 a year. If you subtract the $8,000 cost of licensing SimpList, that's a real-dollar saving of $37,000 a year. This number is for formal classroom training only, but back at work there's always going to be some amount of '1 on 1' informal training going on (which is much less efficient than 1 teacher to many students). As that also became a lot easier, the real cost savings were actually much higher. And remember, this is just the cost savings associated with training, and doesn't include the on-going cost savings associated with everyone being able to do their jobs a lot faster and easier.

At the end of the day almost everything boils down to money, and if it costs more to train people on z/OS than it does to train them on other platforms, it's a big strike against z/OS. Making the mainframe easier to use (and thereby saving money) can only be a good thing.

Dave Salt

SimpList(tm) - try it; you'll get it!

http://www.mackinney.com/products/program-development/simplist.html