Re: what was the single mgmt decision made in mid-1990s that slowed the evolution of ILE/RPG?

Steve Richter wrote:

From today's ITJungle, there is letter to the editor regarding RPG

being saddled by its legacy codebase.

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh021609-story06.html

There is a reference in the letter to an IBM mgmt decision that
stopped RPG and ILE from evolving into a language like C# or Java.
What decision would that have been and why was it made?

"... Tackling the pure language question first. RPG has been evolving
steadily over the last 30 years or so. Unfortunately, it hasn't
evolved quickly or far enough and, if I am to believe people I have
worked with that were on the original ILE team at IBM, that could go
down to a single management decision back in the mid-1990s on how far
to take the language. If that evolution were given a shot in the arm
and a strategic future by initiating an open source community to
develop it, as you are suggesting, what would it end up like? Probably
like C# or Java in all likelihood. ..."

I don't stop by here often, but this note caught my eye. Of course, I
was there at the time, so I think I might be able to contribute to this
thread. Or incite flames. We'll see once I'm done typing!

There were a lot of decisions made in the early 1990's regarding RPG IV.
For the most part, almost all made sense at the time. The biggest
decision was over the question of fixed versus free format. The general
consensus was that the RPG community was not ready for a fully free-form
language AT THAT TIME. We were able to add limited free-form syntax in
the form of keywords and in the form of the Extended-Factor-2 calcs. The
latter barely made it into the language, though. If we had kept to the
original schedule, the language would likely have turned out very different!

Sure, there were some customers who wanted RPG IV to be much more. But
in general, many of those people moved on to other languages, such as Java.

Should RPG IV have been made more like Java or C#? Why bother. Those
languages have already been implemented!

Besides, in the years since RPG IV first came out, a lot has happened in
the computer world. You can't just compare RPG IV with Java and C#. The
real action is happening in the realm of the object-oriented scripting
languages, like Python and Ruby. With the speed of CPU's today, the fact
that these languages are interpreted is no longer the disadvantage it
once was. For numerous reasons, RPG IV simply has no hope in catching up
to the capabilities of these languages.

Cheers! Hans