IBM. Fucking IBM. I have not heard ONE person say “We should totally become an IBM shop!” Because only people who were already STUCK with IBM when better options presented themselves still use IBM bullshit. And those people... ooooooh those fuckers are in SO MUCH denial. “Yeah but IBM does such-and-such too.” YEAH? Well your business model shouldn’t be built on businesses held captive to your antique bullshit. That shit is Stockholm syndrome. Textbook, fucking Stockholm syndrome. Don’t tell me “It used to be we could only have EIGHT character file names.” THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A THING. EVER. Fucking THINK about it. If you have to justify something based how much WORSE it used to be, that thing probably fucking sucks.

Cool rant, broseph.

I just had to get it out of my system.

Cool rant tho.
Bro. Can I call you bro, or would you rather we keep it formal until we've exchanged Google+ profiles? Also, my mom wants to know if you're allergic to tacos. Cool, talk to you later 👊

I was going to let it slide, but since it was in bold, I couldn't 😉. There is a really good reason for short filenames. Back in the mists of time, resources were very limited. Which is why Y2K was ever a thing, too. Add in the fact that we now program to a 2 week horizon, and 10 years from now someone will be ranting that material design should have never, ever been a thing. Ok, bad example, that's happening already.

@monkeyboy Cool story. IIIIIIIIS there a good reason they only allow for 10 character file names today?

There used to be the old sentence: nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

In large companies, if you pick a large vendor, with admittedly a lot of bureaucracy, dubious tech and huge fees, your job is safe but also you will go through less problems.

Not all decisions are done to favor tech. At the management level you need to be able to answer to investors, have reputable vendors, etc because it softens problems. This is very important when it comes to funding: if your new cool tech has a problem, it’s much harder to defend than if the IBM solution is not working.

Programmers need to stop seeing a project as code only: it’s a product with finances, marketing, etc involved and sometimes to make one side work, you hurt the other side; it means that sometimes a slow, more expensive and cumbersome solution is the right one, even if the tech team does not like it. Took me over 15 years to really understand it...

I'm pretty sure that was a thing due to the machine architectural reasons. It's like ranting about when rewriting a file using Fortran, you have to open file number, rewind then write, you can cry out loud but it existed the time when computer was a big punch card machine. Same for the IBM, people kept legacy stuffs for backward compatibility concerns because many industries are still relying on it.

I've
Been
Misled

Ah just the IBM filename relatwd part, I'm not interested in the business related thing.

As a z guy I cannot tell you the number of programs I have seen written in the 80’s, relinked for LE in the 90’s and still running today, largely untouched. Backwards compatibility has something going for it. It sucks sometimes, don’t get me wrong. But not having to recompile something every few years has something going for it.

And for clarification, if you are referring to 8 character file names on z/os, it is 8 character qualifiers, up to 44 character file names, including dots.

*yay* IBM AIX vi, where you can't even set tab length! So great when you are on an 60*20 VPN terminal! 😫

@ihatecomputers No, Broseph is fine. Let’s keep it formal. 😆