In one word; no.

Mainframes are dead. Yes, they still exist, but it's an existence in the same way COBOL still exists.

What is it you want to do?

If it is business applications then you are better off putting the time into SQL and/or some specific database platform logic.

Then there's the fact that lots of 'business applications' are mostly moving towards the web delivery model now, so is it front end or back end application delivery you want to cover?

Either way, C and assembly is about as far away from modern business applications as you can possibly get.

I started out 25 years ago doing UNIX sysadmin and what you would call "DevOps" these days; Python, PHP, Perl, Mysql/Postgres DBA and scaling/performance optimization. I didn't touch C at all, despite it being my favourite language.

I've spent the last 10-15 years doing more infrastructure work; moving to large scale virtualization (VMware, Citrix xen, Openstack) and middleware design (authentication, caching) and most recently high performance computing / supercomputer support.

I'd say the most common programming skill across all of that varied career is probably "glue" scripts - the ability to automate configuration, chain systems together or create pipelines of data flows between disjointed systems.

megatron-uk wrote on 2025-07-22, 08:10:

...What is it you want to do? […]
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...What is it you want to do?

If it is business applications then you are better off putting the time into SQL and/or some specific database platform logic....

Either way, C and assembly is about as far away from modern business applications as you can possibly get.

I started out 25 years ago doing UNIX sysadmin...I didn't touch C at all, despite it being my favourite language...

I'd say the most common programming skill across all of that varied career is probably "glue" scripts - the ability to automate configuration, chain systems together or create pipelines of data flows between disjointed systems.

I have been asking Google generative AI about the server side/backend for web development. Mostly because I realized that it is more common to find scripting languages like Ruby and javascript and programming languages like Java or python for business applications. I also noticed to broaden chances of getting a job in backend development noSQL databases are common for websites. And to instead focus on business RDBMS/SQL is better for backend applications. Then you were mentioning getting applications to communicate. Here RESTful APIs and gRPC are an important skill for the backend but also there is the choice of the RESTful API and GraphQL for caching.

I am definitely interested in business applications more than websites.

What I am thinking is that to distinguish myself from "the majority" I should specialize in performance. This means that many working on the backend might use a scripting language like PHP or Ruby and most using an OOP will use Python or Java. I would use C and libraries for networking. Also web server modules, ie apache. Also systems programming. So here assembly code can be useful. I would focus on RDBMS and query optimization as well.

About IBM and their free courses, this is a great way to get to the core of the business world if one is interested in business applications. As for C and C++, they are relevant for z/OS systems programming.