logoalt Hacker News

jtotheh10/02/20241 replyview on HN

I worked for a while as a contractor for the US Dept. of Education Student Loan system. It was z/OS with DB2 and most new business logic was done in this weird language "Gen" https://www.broadcom.com/products/mainframe/application-deve... . Gen can supposedly "generate" java and other stuff but they used it to generate COBOL for the mainframe. You could debug the Gen code on the 3270 emulator, rather than trying to deal with the generated COBOL. There were a small number of people (like 6) who were handling that code. The data and I guess some of the code went back to like 1980 at least. There was so much legacy code, I doubt they've changed platforms. I was supposed to be more a Java guy but I did a little Gen. Mainframe is very alien to me. The people that knew it well could really crank on it, though. I joined when they were converting an MS ASP front end to a Java one. So we wrote Java that users interacted with via the web and that made calls to Gen (really, to cobol). In retrospect there was a lot wrong with that operation... One interesting problem that came up once was that the mainframe didn't sort things the same as Java. It turned to be caused by EBCDIC vs UTF.


Replies

sigmonsays10/02/2024

thanks for sharing that, it's super entertaining to consider what crazy things people might be doing in the future. Debugging EBCDIC was a surprise and got me laughing.