Re: When an AS/400 is called an iSeries

Tommy,

Every time I do a relevant presentation, I ask how many people do MOSTLY
maintenance programming. From your words, you would be surprised at how much
is actually being done. It is not 95%, but it is way more than 5%. It
certainly is the majority who respond with a yes.

As for effort, there are a few people who are working to improve the
education of or community who deserve lots of recognition. They are
contributors to this list, for sure, and their work is stellar. And, there
are people like David who, on their own time and their own resources, ensure
things like this forum remain a force in our industry. The effort to which I
am referring, however, is a marketing effort. There is little effort in
upgrading our vernacular from what is perceived to be old. There is little
effort in getting the word out to people NOT in our industry. We are so
inward looking some times, that it hurts us. I suggested once that IBM hand
out t-shirts to every softball team from every System i company with the
letter "i" in red and nothing else. What happened? Nothing. So, I made some
buttons with iGeek on them, and handed them out to people at COMMON - and
every time I visited a company with other platforms, I passed them out to
people who were not System i developers. I have a little time to do that,
and if everyone with a little time did that, we could change the world.

Someone recently accused our industry of being passionless. I disagreed at
the time, but I am finding more and more that the passion lies in loving the
platform, but not in promoting it. I have my job, why would I worry about
the future of my job? It is hard to reach these people and harder to engage
them in marketing our future. I would love to meet some of these "OTHERS" of
who you speak.. All of us have much to gain, but few of us are willing to
stick our neck out and make more than just an argument.

Trevor




On 6/11/07 12:23 PM, "Holden Tommy" <Tommy.Holden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Oh well....i've been hearing the same dying theory applied to COBOL, RPG
and various other languages...the same will hold true for this platform.
It's not going away, it's reinventing itself constantly. The hardware
has improved, the OS has improved and the programming languages are
being updated and functionality added. PC languages change
too...continually, the thing is the PC languages (for the most part ...
See M$ for examples...) are not backward compatible. Processor models
are not that big of an issue here. Would PC's die if they didn't
improve from the x86 to Pentium? I doubt it. Is it better? Of course,
but PC sales (and any other platform) does not hinge upon the processor
model but the need for the system.

Now on to the "maintenance programming jobs" in my last 3 jobs spanning
8 years. I may have spent 5% of the time doing maintenance programming
which leaves 95% doing new development. I understand this may not be
the norm but to say all (or the majority) of RPG developers are doomed
to maintaining existing code is ludicrous at best.

I have been working (in my sparse spare time) on open-source projects to
make a feeble effort to improve the community as a whole. There are
several others on this mailing list that do that as well. To say there
is not a "little effort" is not really true. I forget but some where in
this thread someone mentioned that we should speak to people outside of
our workplace and to IBM, this IS being done. I firmly believe that the
people involved in this and other forums are doing their best to keep
the system in front of the public. It's my humble opinion that we need
to recruit OTHERS that aren't participating to join the fight. I
appreciate everyone's thoughts on this (even Steve Richter with whom I
tend to disagree with...not in a vindictive way just different schools
of opinion ;-)...) All of us have much to gain by fighting for what we
know is best but at the end of the day, the squeaky wheel may get the
grease but the louder the wheel the better. Go recruit us some help in
the fight instead of preaching to the choir...

FWIW, IT jungle is not the end-all be-all of computing...there are many
more websites that can be used for reference but you have to bear in
mind that even reporters/writers there is always some bias based on how
things should work, are working, etc. I take things with a grain of
salt..(sometimes the whole frigging shaker if needed...)


Thanks,
Tommy Holden