My, it’s damn quiet around here!

It’s been some twenty days since my last post. What has happend is that, after languishing for several months as maintainer for a project scheduled to be dismissed, I’ve been moved to something completely different.

After refining my C++ skills for almost ten years, after embracing object orientation, then generic programming, then template meta-programming (in rather small doses, to be honest), an unexpected twist in my career has suddenly brought me to the extreme frontier of software development: Cobol on System i (aka iSeries aka AS/400).

Well, yes, so it’s the opposite frontier from the one that’s usually boasted, but frontier it is, at least for me. If we discount a couple of brief encounters with menu based applications that ran on IBM mainframes, it’s been close to twenty years since I logged into, sorry onto, a system I knew nothing about, the last one being VAX/VMS, I think.

I must say I find it rather amusing to have to learn a set of technologies that were considered obsolete when I was at the university about a quarter of a century ago. I expect to post more on the subject in the coming weeks, even though blog time has become awfully scarce.