RE: When an AS/400 is called an iSeries

What's the average age of an RPG programmer?

This one hit home for me when I was at RPGWorld and Bob Cozzi asked the
attendees who was going to be retiring in the next 2 years (about 5 hands
raised) then he asked who was under 30 (myself and another raised their
hands). This is out of about 160 people. Granted this was an RPG specific
conference and the ages would be much different at an IBM tech conf I am
guessing. But none-the-less it is pretty sickening to see the drop off of
RPG programmers coming into the community.

The bummer is that the IBM initiative to get into colleges probably
addresses more the Websphere/Java technologies than the native languages
like RPG development. Really too bad, because RPG is a solid and
uncomplicated modular language, if it had all the RAD tools like Java I
think it would be second to none on the "vendor locked in languages".

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Lukas Beeler
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2007 3:26 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: When an AS/400 is called an iSeries

What does vendor lock-in have to do with RPG code? I don't see the
correlation. Would the customer be less locked in if the code were
Java, Visual Basic, C#, COBOL, or whatever.

Java is a different animal - Java is going Open Source and available on
almost every halfway sane platform.

But yes, Visual Basic, C# et. al. usually mean vendor lock in just as RPG -
but as Microsoft is currently the leading platform, customers do not feel
the vendor lock in (maybe a market expert could explain this phenomenom).

Another point is that COBOL and RPG are considered legacy - .NET with VB and
C# are not. Java is not.

I just don't see the correlation between vendor lock-in and RPG.

RPG is vendor lock-in at it's finest. RPG has it's very own world, that is
completely different from all mainstream languages.

It's pretty clear that 5250 use has really dropped off.

No. Definitivly not. The reason why this hasn't happened is the excellent
backwards compatibility that the System i provides. I know several shops
that run 10 year old applications.

From a purely technological standpoint, this is a bad thing.

But for business reasons, it might make sense to stick to the old
applications, as long as they run under a supported platform.

Why pick on RPG?

Because it's legacy technology. How many students do you know that know RPG?
What's the average age of an RPG programmer? How many people do you know
that never had to work with a System i, but are now learning RPG?

I know several Unix/C programmers that have switched to using .NET/C# - but
I've never seen somebody switch to RPG/System i. I would be interested in
samples/experiences from others on this list. Do you know people that
switched e.G. from .NET/C# or Java to RPG?




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