[Info-vax] What does VMS get used for, these days?

[John Forkosh]

Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
> Edgar Ulloa  <ulloa.edgar at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> But in our days, you consider that there will be new jobs
>> will it be just keeping the current one until it is migrated
>> to another operating system? What do you think?
> 
> When I was in college, every class pretty much used a different computing
> environment, so I got basic experience in a whole lot of different operating
> systems and programming languages in the process just as a free bonus.

Yeah, but in the 1980s Digital had the smart idea (and too bad
Digital had some not-so-smart ideas later) of giving hefty discounts
to educational institutions, with the idea that students primarily
learning on their hardware and OS would advocate adopting it when
they moved on to the business world. I'd hazard a guess that many
of the diehard-to-this-day VMS advocates were beneficiaries
(or victims) of that strategy.

> So I don't particularly feel bad about moving to one more operating
> system after having spent much of my life moving from one to another.

Ditto. At least, when I was a full-time employee, and potential
employers looked at my overall background, checked my references,
and figured it was well worth their while to bring me up-to-speed
on whatever environment (language, os, dbms) they worked with.
But now, as a consultant (contract programmer) working through
my own one-man S-corp, I can pretty much only get hourly contracts
where I'm productive on day 1. Even fixed-price contracts are hard
to come by if your resume doesn't demonstrate pre-existing expertise 
on the client's environment.

> But, that said, I miss commercial grade operating systems that are 
> database-centric with the filesystem and database being integrated.  I
> think that is a good approach for commercial applications, what we once
> called "ADP."  Perhaps the future isn't VMS but I would like to see some
> of the concepts within VMS integrated into future commercial systems.
> 
> As software becomes more and more expensive, I think the need to have an
> efficient operating system that provides database features in the kernel
> becomes more important.
> --scott

I gotta disagree there. Decomposing the environment lets you migrate
applications more easily if that becomes necessary or desirable.
Like if mysql or msql provides all necessary dbms functionality,
they're typically pretty easy to install just about anywhere.
Even more generally, I usually try to abstract the dbms needs
of an application by writing a little library of glue functions,
whereby the application never directly makes any dbms calls at all,
just issues calls to the glue functions, which isolate the dbms and
can then be written/rewritten to work with whatever dbms is convenient.
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j at f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )