On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Don't get me wrong, I love RDi. SEU gives me splinters.
I got those points, actually.
So, to close the circle, I don't think we midrangers ever had
a development environment. [...] 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.
To me, this is kind of sad. [...]
I realise all too late that my note sounds like a cry in the dark. I
don't use RDi because it sucks the least. I use RDi because it's
genuinely made my programming (not just editing) better. That doesn't
mean I will settle for minimally acceptable: I want a development
environment that rivals those found on other platforms.
I actually got all this too. You never gave the impression that you
were merely tolerating RDi.
What I was referring to as "kind of sad" is that there has never been
and evidently still isn't a "proper" midrange development environment.
This is not so much a failure of RDi or even IBM. To me, it's mainly
just a consequence of the origins of the system.
Unix-derived operating systems are popular with developers because
Unix was created by hackers, for hackers, to hack. It would be
strained but not ludicrous to say that Unix itself (including all the
bundled software in any standard distribution) *was* a development
environment, and a pretty good one at that. And newer incarnations
have only gotten better.
The midrange and its predecessors were created by International
Business Machines, for folks doing business, to do business. If
anything, the system was intended to be as friendly as possible to
*nonprogrammers* rather than to programmers.
You've now also just said that RDi (which costs many hundreds of
dollars per seat, plus ongoing maintenance) doesn't provide what
Eclipse (usually free) does.
So if you've got a talented programmer just starting out, you can kind
of guess which direction they'll probably lean, if they're interested
in programming.
Yes, I know that the typical midrange employee doesn't foot the bill
for the tools directly, but then they are at the mercy of the
bean-counters upstairs, and so they learn to either suffer with what
is included (which gives you splinters) or to make business cases to
their higher-ups, all for tools which aren't as good as the free stuff
for other platforms. (Mind you, these skills are all actually quite
valuable; my only contention is that it's tougher to sell this
scenario to top programming talent.)
And it's also sad to me because better tooling is *entirely possible*.
There is no *technical* reason why the i can't have world-class,
state-of-the-art tooling. I am not a businessperson, and I'm not
commenting on the quality of IBM's business decisions. All I'm saying
is that I am confident IBM has the resources and technical know-how to
make the platform much more attractive to programmers than it
currently is.
Having said that, the midrange is a different beast. I could write all
my apps in C, with EMACS and make but I'd be missing out on a lot of
very wonderful things IBM i offers that I can't get on Linux or Windows.
People coming to this platform should try to grok that, and not write
RPG as though it were C with a funny accent.
I agree with most of that. I would contend that most people won't be
tempted to write C-style code in RPG, mainly because their domains
don't overlap very much.
The big way in which the midrange is a different beast is that it's
fundamentally just a "slightly hands-dirty" layer over a database,
whereas the other major platforms are designed specifically to be more
general purpose. That is, the other platforms say "here's a
processor, some memory, and a file system; have at it!" The midrange
says "here's a database; you can access the records in a procedural
style, or you can do it with SQL". RPG is built to process records
procedurally. C is built to build operating systems, high-performance
tools, and practically any kind of lowish to medium-high level
programming.
Now, that said, RPG seems so well optimized on the i that I actually
*do* use it as my "high-performance tool-building" language there,
whether or not database access is involved.
The fact that some midrangers can have this discussion is a very
positive sign for the platform in my opinion. It means that more of us
are familiar with how the other side does programming.
I have to agree with this. As much as I complain now, I do think the
situation is slowly getting better, and has been for some time. I
wish I'd found these lists sooner.
John
midrange.com
