The Green Screen
I started my mainframe training with some ISPF. I’m going to be honest this was a rude awakening, I’m used to all my modern day luxuries. I came from Visual Studio Enterprise, Azure DevOps, GitHub Copilot and all those modern day innovations. So when I first connected to a mainframe through my 3270, the way god intended, I was baffled about the antiquity of it all.
At first everything felt hidden and hard to access, trying to make datasets at first was confusing. This was mainly because of the legacy terms it all uses. Modern day developers have no need to know what tracks and cylinders are. Eventually you start to know things and understand why things are happening. You also become really fast at switching out screens and knowing where to look for everything. This might be a controversial opinion, at least among my colleagues in the training, but I much prefer coding in ISPF now. It just feels like a tailored experience. Everything is exactly where you could ever want/need it to be.
I remember one day we got to work in Visual Studio Code. We had a code-a-thon going on with Joris and Frank from IBM (I will write about this in the future). Everyone was really giddy about the prospect of coding in a modern day IDE especially since up until that point we had only worked in ISPF. I’ll be completely honest I was lost, I thought VSCode would be really pleasant to work with. Not only because I could see my code in it’s entirety or because I could actually use my backspace regularly again, but because I thought there would be a lot of improvements since IBM themselves let people start out with VSCode through Zxplore.
Now tell me why everything felt so much more complex. I actually missed the command line in ISPF, I missed SD.ST. If I wanted to do anything now I constantly had to ask myself how I even could do it. it’s funny how fast the tables can turn like that. The little time I had had with ISPF made me love it and see it’s worth.
I think the moral of this story is that, even though it is a shock, I think new mainframers should bite the bullet and just start out on ISPF. Before they know it they might not want to go back to their cushy modern IDE. But hell what do I know, I’m also still green behind my ears.
Until I write again,
Lennie Busschots