My first professional dev job was COBOL and it's associated tech, a majority of the stuff we did was banking stuff and at the time it seemed like that's what a majority of the COBOL market took up but I could be wrong
Ah COBOL, oddly enough I started my first dev job in COBOL in the banking industry(I'm in my 30s and started my professional coding career in my 20s), I have mixed feelings about it...it's a weird language but it has it's place, I wouldn't advise anyone to jump into a COBOL career path unless you are doing it for a job and a job alone.
I would kill to get a personal mainframe though. Read a story some time ago about some guy who snagged one from a government auction. Sadly they never have anything cool when I look.
I remember that story. I don't think he ever got it working. There's a lot to getting a real mainframe running, starting with some onerous licensing terms for the software. And the cost to power one would be ugly.
There were some actual 'personal mainframes' made by IBM. The PC/370 was a PC or PC/AT with a set of ISA bus mainframe processor addin cards. The PC became the I/O processor. The PC/390 was a later version based on a PS/2 running OS/2. All long obsolete now.
> He and his old computer friends played around with some applications that were on the platform, and even made an FTP server that put some data on the internet.
Otherwise if you live in the Midwest...uw oshkosh use to have one for free. The stipulation was that you had to remove it from the campus. And it weighed 3 tons
This looks really awesome I've always been curious of mental models so I just ordered a copy from Amazon. Also Gabriel, kudos to your work and DDG, I'm right near DDG headquarters and it's nice to know things like DDG are being created in my area.
Well, my answer is this: Coming from the perspective on a Pythonista, C++ seems tedious and error-prone. Rust, on the other hand, is merely tedious -- which is progress of a sort, one has to admit.
Coincidentally, I personally started learning Rust as C++ was a lot more difficult to learn by myself. The Rust book[1] is a great resource as it makes learning pretty complex topics fairly easy to approach.
Personally the thing that really sold me over was the "Building a guessing game" section, as it showed how to use the build system to pull in external libraries. I found these aspects specifically difficult to learn when learning C++. Plus, after learning Rust, I was able to go back to C++ and better understand it. Still have no clue about build systems though.
