RE: Modernizing applications

I can agree with the need to know multiple languages to some extent but at some point there is not enough time in a day to keep fluent with the number of languages you listed here, let alone all the different IDEs and Frameworks you have to know in order to code in them. As someone else mentioned earlier every application programmer these days needs to know HTML, Javascript and CSS in addition to other languages. I know people who do nothing but these three and can't stay current with the changes or the new techniques that people come up with. Add to that anything else (Java, PHP, RPG, C++, C#, VB, CL, perl, REXX, Ruby, Python, and on and on and on) and you may be able to say you can look at the code and know the basic syntax but you there is no way you can really say your fluent in any more than one or two. Don't forget to add in the many add-on libraries you can get for just about any of these languages to help you code faster and things like XML, SVG, Flash, Sliverlight multiple flavors of SQL for each type of database that exists, and some basic understanding of the OS your writing applications for. With all the other things that are pushed onto me to know just to build web applications I find it difficult to even stay current with one language, in my case RPG.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of James H. H. Lampert
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 11:58 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Modernizing applications

There is a grain of truth.

But then "a grain of truth" is as essential an ingredient to any
effective "Big Lie" as brazenness or outrageousness.

The grain of truth is that most IBM Midrange programmers have a tendency
to learn one or two languages, and then attempt to use those languages
for EVERYTHING, whether they're good choices for a given project or not.
It's the old "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"
bit.

Programmers should become fluent in as many different languages as
possible. I realized that before I was halfway through my Freshman year
at the University; that's why, when I walked away with my sheepskin, I
also walked away with at least rudimentary fluency in Pascal, PL/I,
Lisp, PDP-11 assembler, and COBOL, as well as adding a few more dialects
of BASIC and FORTRAN to the ones I'd learned in high school. And as a
result, teaching myself C was relatively easy, as were MI, Smalltalk,
and Java, when I began working for Touchtone, and RPG, CL, and HTML were
downright trivial exercises.

If more programmers saw the advantage of having a wide variety of
languages at their disposal, then maybe IBM might have brought more
languages into ILE, instead of demoting them from LP to PRPQ (and
eventually dropping them entirely), and grafting so many other-language
characteristics onto RPG that it began to look like the results of a
drunk biologist playing with flatworms.

And likewise, outside the Midrange world, we wouldn't be seeing C used
for so much that it's ill-suited for, both system code that ought to
have been written in assembler, and application code that should have
been written in a true HLL.

--
JHHL