> the mainframe 3270 terminal user interface experience is terrible

[... for new users]

For expert users? I'd pit it against any interface you want.

No-mouse + hands-on-keyboard + tab is hard to argue with.

Sadly, the number of people who remember when GUIs could be driven from memory by keyboard-only has dwindled.

Watch a 10-year veteran insurance employee use a green screen.

Or as a counter-example, try to tab through your modern app du jour. (Modern developers often don't even bother to set indexes correctly)

> Watch a 10-year veteran insurance employee use a green screen.

Yes! I knew an Insurance customer service op who self-described as having no computer skills, but when I saw her using Reflection it was like watching a speedcuber savant.

The spit take for me was doing process documentation, screen by screen.

I would explain to them to stop after each screen or keystroke, so I could document it.

Despite being smart people and understanding the ask, almost every SME I worked with failed at some point, blazing through multiple screens without even realizing it.

That's some strong muscle memory there!

My mom, who worked in insurance customer service, was very quick with the green-screen interface. Not so much the J2EE replacement for said interface.

Except when you must set tabindex="0" or "-1" or Bootstrap's modals won't work. /grin

> For expert users? I'd pit it against any interface you want.

Linux CLI with a good modern shell and Python versus 3270 block mode and Rexx would be an interesting match up.

Similarly Emacs vs XEDIT.

There was a big appliance/tv/stuff retail chain in my home country that create a fancy new web app for their sales personnel. If you were smart you'd always look for the older salesman, that would ignore the new web app shell and use the old mainframe app from a terminal emulator. it made the sales experience like 3x faster.

> Sadly, the number of people who remember when GUIs could be driven from memory by keyboard-only has dwindled.

This is so very true, and it's tragic.

Watch an experienced keyboard user, such as many blind users, navigating Windows and it's a wonder of efficiency and speed. It makes the Vim prowess of many Linux folks look very sad, because Vim is just a single editor, while with Windows' keyboard UI, the entire OS and all its apps are operable at this speed. Desktop, file manager, all bundled apps, all 3rd party apps... everything has one global unified keyboard UI.

This kind of thing goes back five decades, actually. One of the earliest versions of Unix was PWB/Unix, for "Programmers' Workbench". It was designed as a system for AT&T engineers to author programs for the mainframe in a more sensible (for the time) environment and included software to submit jobs to the mainframe once the programs were written.

The idea of "Unix as your IDE" is a deep, deep cut into Unix lore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

There's also an IBM-built emulator that has at some point shipped with Eclipse. I used to work on it. The 3270 was fine, just took a bit of getting used to. JCL was the real horror show.

JCL is notable for being considered the worst programming language ever even by its own creators.

Somehow I think it is still better than the YAML spaghetti that is used for the same purpose nowadays.

"JCL: even YAML is better"

The very argument that was posited by JCL creators about why it was a bad language is one that hits YAML very, very, very hard.

The creators of JCL admitted later that the original sin of JCL was that it explicitly tried to NOT BE a programming language. Everything "programmable" evolved out of real-world needs, creating the mess that it has become.

You can see it today with "programming in YAML", whether it is Ansible, Kustomize, Kyverno (K8s manifests get a pass because they are just serialization of non-programmable thing), or any other weird "we started to add functions to JSON/YAML dumps"

I keep thinking of writing a Terraform equivalent in Lisp. Would also be handy to replace configuration files.

I'd say it might be very similar to Pulumi or Chef.

From my own musings about making such a tool :)

One day Terraform will anger me enough that such unwise endeavour is inevitable.

> But you will then discover that the mainframe 3270 terminal user interface experience is terrible.

I was an intern at IBM UK in the late 80s and I had a 3279 on my desk connected to a 3090 mainframe. My recollection is that it was fine for editing and running code: sharp, bright text and snappy response. The clicky keyboard was nice too - probably the best I've ever used in the decades since - although the height of the enclosure would probably hurt my wrists now. The key caps had APL symbols on them too, which was interesting and prompted me to learn about that language a bit. Mostly I was writing APL and REXX code for image processing.

Some of the f/t employees I worked with had worked on the development of the 3297 at Hursley Park. They had some interesting stories.