Re: Dis- merits of AS/400

[email@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (James W Kilgore)]

Hi Don,

Just so you know .... I'm not picking on you, you just brought up some very 
common
issues and I'm using them as a guideline for my turn on the soap box <g>

Don Schenck wrote:

> In all seriousness ... the biggest DIS-advantage of the AS/400 is it's
> unfortunate ties to the RPG language.
>
> It is difficult to nearly impossible to find skilled "AS/400" programmers that
> do not have an RPG "bent" (or bias) to their thinking.

True.  The last time I worked with an install that had a resident COBOL 
programmer
they kept looking over my shoulder and gasped in amazement that I could do in 12
lines of code that took them 50.  I'm sure that the JAVA/C programmers would 
feel
the same.

>
>
> Another disadvantage is the apparent high price of the system.

Glad you said "apparent".  No need to beat the issue on cost of ownership, but
first impressions mean a lot.

>
>
> Another disadvantage is the lack of support for non-IBM DBMS's.

DB2 is a bad thing?  From a designer/programmer point of view SQL is SQL and I
could case less about the underlying RDMS.  (As long as SQL is SQL)

>
>
> Another: proprietary hardware costs more.

See your point about "apparent".

>
>
> Another: Not as popular, therefore not as well supported by the press. For
> example, walk into the local Barnes and Noble (or Borders, whatever) and look
> for books about AS/400. Then look for books (and magazines!) about the AS/400.

Point well thrashed on this list already.  The times they are a changing. (with
apologies <g>)

>
>
> Peace,
>
> -- Don Schenck
> www.SchenckTech.com
>

Peace right back attcha
James W. Kilgore
email@James-W-Kilgore.com

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