Re: RPGILE programmers and the future of iSeries

I am posting this on behalf of one our local educators who I asked for her opinion.
- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis
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I am an educator in Michigan. I believe that this issue presents a call to action for many amongst the IBM i community, including IBM, industry professionals and ISVs, and educators. IBM is proactively working on raising awareness of this vital and always improving platform and needs to ramp up this effort. Industry professionals and ISVs need to support efforts to recruit new programmers, and they are stepping up. Just last week, through a generous grant from Maxava and an invitation from the Wisconsin Midrange Professionals Computer Association's president (thanks Maxava and Jim Buck!) I was able to bring three of my students to the WMCPA's conference. My students, along with several other students, were welcomed and mentored throughout the conference by industry professionals, and there was a definite sense of the pressing need to raise awareness and attract talent to the IBM i arena. Educators need to bring their curriculum forward by teaching the new technologies that enable RPG to continue to be a viable, strong presence in the modern IT world. We all need to see the looming retirements as an opportunity to step up.

Char Parker
Muskegon Community College

On 3/28/2012 2:46 PM, Jerry Draper wrote:

How can executive management justify keeping iSeries systems when the
pool of RPG programmers are of retirement age or so?

Is that a myth promulgated by *IX PHP folk?

At one place I am hearing that one justification for moving off of an
iSeries is that no "younger" programmers are interested in learning RPG
or it derivitives (ie: RPGILE).

Anyone else encountered this argument?

My view is that RPGILE is just another coding system with a learnable
syntax and that much of the user experience is via front ends written in
java or .net.

The iSeries is a great db engine serving up data to whoever wants it (or
is authorized to it). Tried, true, and trustworthy.

If we are all going to retire at the same moment will the iSeries go poof?

Jerry