4GL's (was: Application modernization & re-engineering)

Joe Pluta wrote:

Which is why I understand your general dislike of 4GLs like EGL. It
requires a level of trust, and I've never trusted anything quite as
much as I trust the combination of CPF and RPG, whatever the current
incarnation. And that in turn is why I still count on RPG for my business logic.

You're 80% of the way there.
You are correct ... I don't trust generated code any further than I can spit it. I far prefer to use code that I wrote or at least can reasonably maintain myself (which is why I'm not adverse to using a code Wizard to create a starting point).

The rest of my dislike is half the quality of the code they generate ... and half being tied to a single companies product to generate the code. Heaven help the company who used a code generator to develop a major application ... have the generator's author go out of business ... and then have something go wrong with the generator due to an OS upgrade. Yes, in the case of EGL, I know the likelihood of this happening is vanishingly slim ... but not with other products.

Case in point ...

After I left SSA I went to work for a company that was using AS/SET to write mainframe replacement programs. The programs we were creating were huge monstrosities that did the simplest of things. They were next to impossible to debug (and I was one of two people who knew enough RPG to actually debug them) and very inefficient.

I convinced my supervisor at the time to let me write my next project in pure RPG & CL without using AS/SET for any of it. Not only was I done in half the time, the code was easy to follow, fast, and a joy to debug. Of course I was the only one (at the time) who was able to work on it ... because I was the only one who knew RPG.

david