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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

It is simply about a wholly different level of reliability that mainframes provide.

They are not at all a trash or a product of corruption or nepotism as many tend to think. That stuff works all the time, and did since ~1960, while we serfs spend our lives fixing bugs resulting from never-ending updates in that hodgepodge of javascript libraries our "efficient", "cheap", "FOSS-based" products are made of.

We all don't use mainframes because marginal or downright dodgy business cases of our products simply won't pay for it, thus we are stuck in this race to the bottom.

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> We all don't use mainframes because marginal or downright dodgy business cases of our products simply won't pay for it, thus we are stuck in this race to the bottom.

Not just because of the expensive hardware, but also because it's all but impossible to get your hands on them as a developer. With Java, JS, Python, .NET, whatever companies have an insanely large pool of people to choose from... quite a few self-taught, some who went to university and studied CS, some who went to more or less decent bootcamps, some who "grew into" programming from other roles. On top of that, last I heard (admittedly a decade ago) the tooling to work on mainframe systems is just as old as the code they're running, so no modern IDEs, debuggers and whatnot.

With mainframes however, companies have to spend their own money, and quite a lot of it, to get trained developers, and on top of that pay a hefty premium for those who submit to fossilized tooling willingly.

IBM's provided a free developer course, including a free z/OS account, for at least a decade now: https://www.ibm.com/z/resources/zxplore

Going through the challenges is worth it just to see how the mainframe way of doing things works, even if you never plan to use a mainframe in your career. There's a lot of core concepts and cultural touchpoints that help you build more reliable systems everywhere else.

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