Every time I hear someone advocating for mainframes, they always praise them and make them appear as something like a computing behemoth, that, while expensive outperforms any commoditiy hardware at the tasks it's good at, wether it's in performance or reliability.

But there's never any real world use case. It's always just "If you're running a mainframe, you don't care about money". No performance benchmarks, no architecture comparisons. You get shown an architecture diagram of a mainframe, next to one of say, a cloud system and you get asked "See??", like the conclusion is obvious.

> Instead, we got lowest-common-denominator systems. Not what was best, merely what was cheapest, easiest, and just barely good enough – the “minimum viable product” that an industry of shysters and con-men think is a good thing.

How is this _not_ a good thing??

>But mainframes aren’t. They cost a lot, and rental and licensing costs a lot, and running them costs a lot… everything costs a lot. Meaning you don’t use them if you care about costs that much. You have other reasons. What those are doesn’t matter so much.

...which is exactly my point! Yeah it makes sense that there is a separate ecosystem for mainframes! Because from the outside and these kind of arguments it looks like IBM has been siphoning off some great marketing in the 80s and 90s and _really_ ignorant managers in charge of purchasing at large banks and the US gov.

On an unrelated note, I kinda made the experience that people that like mainframes usually have some weird obsession with high level computing architectures. Is there maybe a correlation?