Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

We tend to reinvent the past as we move into the future. Remember JCL?

I took an class in operating systems in 1980 (yes, I am that old). At least that was the name of the class. In reality, it was a class in what IBM called Job Control language or JCL.

You setup a computer—the IBM 360—with a few lines of something that the professor called a programming language. As students, it looked like strange symbols and other things we could not describe.

There were 80 columns on a punch card or terminal line. Depending on whether you put a comma, colon, or semi-colon in column 77, the machine appeared differently and performed different operations. Now of course, that depended on what symbol you put in columns 76 and 71. That all changed depending on what…

Are you kidding me? That was torture.

Fast forward a decade or few and we have Infrastructure as Code. Write ASCII characters that describe the computer you want to use. Cool. Great idea. Think of all we can do with this concept.

Then, however, you look at examples of Infrastructure as Code. They aren’t as bad as JCL was, but, well, really? We could have done better. Huh?

Perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps I never understood the purpose of JCL and don’t understand the purpose of Infrastructure as Code. My expectations are all askew.