Re: SEU versus vi and Vim

On 4/30/2014 10:22 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:

Regardless of the positive/negatives of VI, VIM, and/or SEU, they are all
still text editors in the end. EMACs come very close to Eclipse (I use it
on my Linux boxes) but it's still not a true development environment. It
is however free whereas Rational is not, nor should it be.

I'm not sure what the point of disagreement is. Maybe it's the
definition of 'development environment'. What is the difference between
'development' vs 'editor' in the midrange space? Especially when the de
facto bar is set at PDM options 2, 14 and very occasionally, 15? I've
been a user of RDi for decades, but RDi doesn't offer a single tool
beyond Click to edit (PDM 2) and Ctrl-Shift-C (PDM 14) to help me
assemble a midrange application. There's no build tool, no make, no
ant, nothing at all that tracks the constituent parts of an app that
I've changed and does a semi-automated build/deploy for me. *I* the
programmer have to remember every single piece and *I* the programmer
have to make sure to compile those pieces in the proper order and *I*
the programmer have to remember to assemble (CRTSRVPGM, ADDBNDDIRE,
binder language exports, etc) those pieces into working software.

The mention of Eclipse is, in my opinion, a red herring. On Windows or
Linux, I can use Eclipse to refactor a C or Java program. No such
ability exists for us midrangers. On other platforms I can use make to
detect that the prototypes have changed and automatically recompile the
affected modules and automatically rebind them into an executable. No
such ability exists for us midrangers.

Oh, sure there are commercial SCM solutions but the point is that for
the type of applications that we tend to develop on the midrange, make
would work quite nicely. Just as it does for many many projects on
Windows and Linux. 5799-PTL provides gmake, but it isn't i-aware. It
can't tell that I've changed a line in a source member, which means it
has little utility in my workaday life.

So, to close the circle, I don't think we midrangers ever had a
development environment. RDi is a far better editor than SEU, and
that's plenty good enough for me. The fact that I can use filters that
will ultimately correspond to a given application is also nice, kind of
like a super PDM. But RDi is no development environment. It certainly
does not provide the RPG programmer with the same tooling that Eclipse
provides a C or Java programmer on Linux.

Programmers love to debate editors. This one likes EMACS, that one
likes VIM and there's always some joker who swears he can maintain
Firefox with grep and sed. Midrangers for the most part never
experienced different editors, and similarly, have never experienced
even the minimalist 'development environment' the lowliest Linux machine
offers out of the box. So we have nothing to compare with, and that's
too bad, because if we did, we'd probably realise that editing isn't
worth diddly if we can't assemble the constituents into a properly
working application.

Our limited application assembly tool set is crippling our design
choices. That's one man's opinion and worth every penny you paid for
it. But I think everyone will agree that there's more to being a
programmer than editing source.
--buck

-----Original Message-----
From: Midrange-NonTech [mailto:midrange-nontech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of John Yeung
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 8:54 AM
To: Non-Technical Discussion about the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: SEU versus vi and Vim (was: Is COBOL dead?)

On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Jim Oberholtzer
<midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

a large amount of the development on AIX is in COBOL. Up until IBM
provided them with Rational, they did not even have a true development
environment on the UNIX side. (VI and VIM are not development
environments but rather little brothers to SEU)

I'll grant you that vi is nowhere near Eclipse when it comes to providing a
"development environment". But when it comes to ***editing code***, vi is
actually much more capable than SEU, and Vim is even beyond that.

There is a difficult learning curve with vi, including configuration.
If you want to knock it for anything, knock it for that. I fully admit it's
a pretty serious knock. Also, SEU has extensive built-in support for
certain programming languages that vi doesn't, but that is because the two
editors were developed on vastly different platforms.
If you want to program in any of the numerous languages that are available
for (and typically included with) Unix and Unix-like platforms, vi is far
superior to SEU. Even if there were a Linux version of SEU for programming
in bash, C, Perl, Python, Lisp, PHP, and on and on ad nauseum, vi would win
hands down.

(The only argument you would ever get from Unix/Linux users in an SEU vs. vi
debate is "why isn't Emacs in the conversation, because it wipes the floor
with both of them". Emacs is actually capable enough that it potentially
*does* rival Eclipse as a development environment.
But in some ways it's even harder to learn than vi, so in practice people
only master at most one of vi or Emacs.)

John