RE: Time to get serious

2) How much focus should be placed on RPG II and the cycle?  How much is
it being used in your shop?

Zero RPG II.  And even less RPG III <grin>.  The cycle should be an "you may
see this in your travels" at the _end_ of an RPG IV course.

3) Should there be more emphasis on RPG IV and ILE?

Why would you teach anything _but_ RPG IV?  If they learn IV they can
understand III.  Let me phrase this as a question - when you teach them VB
do you teach them version 3 of VB?  Version 4? If not, then why would you
teach an even _older_ version of RPG.  RPG III was replaced over 10 years
ago.  To continue to teach it is nuts in my opinion.

5) How important are specific languages verses the ability to learn
languages and understand the business processes?

If the student has an aptitude for programming then they will learn multiple
languages easily.  If they do not have aptitude then you'd better hope they
can learn the business process.

6) Any other thoughts?

Talk to Jim Cooper of Lambton College about the updates he made to his RPG
classes.  There's no reason to force students into the green screen world.
I honestly believe this is one of the problems with a lack of RPG students.
When you could be learning VB, .Net and other cool web things, why on earth
would _any_ student want to sign up for boring old green screens and (yawn)
RPG II/III?  It makes no sense.  If you want to make it attractive, have
them build Web Interactions with WDSC, client-server GUI with VisualAge for
RPG, web applications using CGIDEV2 and RPG, etc. etc.

Make subprocedures a major focus of the RPG classes.  What they learn will
apply to any language.


Jon Paris
Partner400
www.Partner400.com