[avgDev]

We've got as400 at work, surprisingly a lot of companies still run it. Thankfully, I do 0 work on it and focus on other applications.

It is becoming a super niche market, once the dinosaurs die off, whoever can come in and work on it will make bank. In fact my company is getting pretty anxious about it, as the cost of even migrating from it is going to be high.

[neilv]

I've thought of doing a startup for that kind of problem: basically, we'd partner-ish with one enterprise customer as a kind of skunkworks attempt to migrate their legacy system to some other platform, at low cost, by leveraging the language development and DSL facilities of Racket. We could hire some top engineers because we tell them we will pay them money to hack Racket. And we keep rights to the Racket part. That first solution is biased to the first customer -- the particular dialects/versions of language they use, other software/facilities they use, their programming conventions and internal libraries, and how they want to map to which new platform. The next enterprise customer we go to, we have a lot less tooling work to do. After a few iterations of that, we have either a semi-turnkey solution, or a proven approach for our team of highly-paid consultants.

As a bit of evidence in support of Racket being a secret sauce for this, I'd point to how ITA Software (before they were aquired by Google) leveraged Lisp to integrate a new, modern node with the IBM legacy airline reservation system network. They publicly stated that a Lisp was what made this effort viable.

(But doing a Web site or app is so much easier and less risky. VCs are set up to give a site/app dotcom wads of money, and want to see you go through the funding rounds and acquisition/IP. And the technical problems are usually well-understood from the start, and it's just a matter of execution. And you can pick a site/app idea that doesn't involve having to do difficult enterprise sales courtships. Also, personally, given that I started working young, so some of the dates on my resume cause my job applications to be deleted instantly, I'm not anxious to be adding showstopper keywords like AS/400 to my resume.)