Re: ile vs. oo

Patrick wrote:
>Is ILE better than OO? I'm always seeing books on OO and
>listening to programmers that code in other languages say OO
>is a must. However, I've read the ILE concepts and the OO
>concepts and listened to the complaints of both from
>developers. OO concepts seem to be rarely acheived in
>practice from what I hear. Don't get me wrong. I'm not
>trying to say one is better than the other. Fact is I've not
>used OO. Just looking for some feedback as I move forward.
>Wondering where to concentrate my efforts on personal
>training this year. Right now I'm focusing on getting more
>into ILE and staying with RPG (maybe some C).

ILE and OO are as similar as apples and aardvarks.

As far as I know, there are few features of ILE that could
be called OO.  ILE is about modules and activation groups.
OO is about modelling data via object abstraction.

OO is common in many problem domains, including web page
and user interface development.  The benefits of adopting
OO development may not be apparent when embarking on a
particular project, however, when that code can be re-used
in subsequent projects, it can reduce development costs at
that time.  If you can take advantage of existing packages,
you can start with reduced development costs.  (For example,
one of the reasons for the success of Perl in web page
implementation is the existence of many freely available
packages that handle most of the work.)

Those familar with my rants know that I'm a big fan of OO.
If you do want to learn OO, I would strongly recommend
beginning with the language Python.  Don't start with Java,
and definitely don't start with C++!  These languages have
their places, and you'll probably want to learn them later.
But Python will give you a better grounding in the basic
principles of OO.  (Check out http://www.python.org/ for
more details.)

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com

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