Over the past five decades, SHARE an independent, volunteer run association has been providing enterprise technology professionals with continuous education and training, valuable professional networking and effective industry influence. SHARE looks to the future of IT technology and real-world uses of technology, from both near and longer-term perspectives. 

I was at the most recent session, August 7-12, in Orlando presenting the latest features in z/OS V1R13 compiler, check out the announce page.  It has been a great experience. I have been able to gain useful insight into customers application development Language, and tool preferences. There is a divide between old and new generation of mainframe skilled professionals as far as choice of development language and tool --it is very subjective! There is no hard data to suggest one set of Language/tool is superior over the other. I have gathered enough anecdotes to make the following statement:

    -> comfort and familiarity with the language as well as familiarity with tools to debug problems biases the skilled professional greatly  

Development shops today, are constrained by very tight development cycle time and resources. There is no time to benchmark one language against another for the same set of requirements/specifications and choose the one that shows the most superior characteristics. Given that we should anticipate to see in the mainframe application space a mix of high level languages, COBOL, PL/I, Fortran, Assembler, C and C++. This mix and match is allowed thanks to the mainframes unique common run-time, Language Environment. 

As compiler developer we need to continue to make the development in such environment as fast and easy as possible, and make the stuff that happens undercover as transparent to users as possible, a.k.a no impact in compile and run time.

Please SHARE :)