But, as an over-30 on HN, I'd be afraid that having the word "mainframe" on my resume would alienate a 20-something co-founder or hiring manager. :)
OK, OK, I did once do a little bit of mainframe-related work. It was reverse-engineering a small part of a certain domain-specific mainframe network protocol, with the goal of replacing at least one of the companies' mainframes with... 21st century Linux servers running... Lisp. (IMHO, the HN karma should at least balance out there by using Lisp, like the post did by using Rust.)
markus_zhang · 4h ago
Interesting. Looks like everyone on HN is getting interesting jobs left and right.
The most compiler-ish work I ever worked on is a yaml to yaml transpiler. I mean, yeah...at least I got to write some recursions.
almostgotcaught · 2h ago
Writing a transpiler is easily the most boring and tedious job you can have, especially if the target or source language is useless (so you don't learn anything useful as a matter of course).
jasonthorsness · 1h ago
I'm surprised modern languages haven't gone farther with base 10 numbers. C# has decimal (not sure how widely used that is) but what other language has built-in, non-library base 10 numbers?
anonzzzies · 3h ago
Nice read but I don't get, and maybe someone here knows;
> 9(3) is shorthand for 999
I did some cobol work in the past and know 9(3) but you can write 999? And how is 4 chars shorthand for 3?
nine_k · 2h ago
I think it's uniformity. You have 9(n) all over the place, and only pay attention to the number in parentheses. It's more error-prone to count repeating characters, and it's easier (to me) to notice a typo in the form 9(4) instead of 9(3) than 9999 instead of 999.
mncharity · 3h ago
> I am currently building tangled.sh — a decentralized code-collaboration platform.
But, as an over-30 on HN, I'd be afraid that having the word "mainframe" on my resume would alienate a 20-something co-founder or hiring manager. :)
OK, OK, I did once do a little bit of mainframe-related work. It was reverse-engineering a small part of a certain domain-specific mainframe network protocol, with the goal of replacing at least one of the companies' mainframes with... 21st century Linux servers running... Lisp. (IMHO, the HN karma should at least balance out there by using Lisp, like the post did by using Rust.)
The most compiler-ish work I ever worked on is a yaml to yaml transpiler. I mean, yeah...at least I got to write some recursions.
> 9(3) is shorthand for 999
I did some cobol work in the past and know 9(3) but you can write 999? And how is 4 chars shorthand for 3?
https://tangled.sh/ . Example repos: https://tangled.sh/@rockorager.dev/lsr https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core