I had a course in uni that taught us assembler on z/os. My advisor told me most students fail the course on the first try because it was so tough and my Prof for that course said if any of us managed to get at least a B in the course, he’d write us a rec letter for graduate school. That course was the most difficult and most fun I’ve ever had. I learned how to properly use registers to store my values for calculations, I learned how to use subroutines. Earned myself that B and went on to take the follow up course which was COBOL. You’re not crazy, I yearn to go back to doing low level programming, I’m mostly doing ruby for my job but I think my heart never left assembler hahaha

This is great for when you type in your root password incorrectly!

If you aren’t already, you could get familiar with the vim motions within VSCode via a plugin. Moving over to a vim setup can be overwhelming, setting up your lsp,linters, other packages. Adding on the need to still learn key bindings makes it extra difficult. I started with VSCode using vim motions, went to doom emacs and used evil mode and then my mentor got me hooked on vim. Do it in steps and you’ll get to a config that lets you code without much fussing, good luck!

I took courses in uni for COBOL and you’re right, the language itself isn’t difficult, it’s honestly a lot like writing plain Englisch but making sure your JCL was correct, checking I think it was the spool in order to make sure your jobs were working correctly, reading memory dumps, it was a ride. I love mainframe but it feels like all jobs mainframe ask for 5+ years experience

I want to stop being a perfectionist. I tend to overthink very simple tasks, trying to make sure I do things in the most efficient manner. Agonize over mistakes. I find it funny that I’m so critical of myself but I would never think to apply that to other people. I’m working on it, it’s just very difficult

I didn’t know about registers, thank you for this!

If it makes you feel even better, I’m a software engineer and I had lots of trouble learning to use GitHub and git, it’s embarrassing to admit it but I’m super glad I learned!

I setup jellyfin plus the arr stack on an rpi4 and man has that little thing changed my life, all the content I could ever want just for the cost of a Usenet provider. Hope you enjoy man!