Re: New RPG programmers

> > Frankly, that one is huge in my book.  If I were a business with some
> > IT skill and not much cash, I'd use PHP, mySQL and a cheap web hosting
> > account from some place like GoDaddy.  That's why PHP has such a
> > following.
> >
> > If I were writing fat client apps, I'd probably download Sun's Java
> > IDE and use that.  Now there is IBM's VARPG and ASNA's VRPG, but
> > neither get much press and both cost $$.  Programmers like to play
> > when they learn (that's how I learned), but the iSeries and RPG are a
> > pretty pricey playground.
> 
> I'd like to address this point.  This idea that anyone can download Java
> from the Internet and learn how to program OO is simply unrealistic.

Absolutely.  But they can probably learn enough to hack something out
that sort of works most of the time.  And don't tell me that companies
won't try to get by with something that sort of works most of the
time.  I'm constantly harping on our users for creating junk with
tools like MS Access.

>  Yes, you can download PHP and MySQL and develop an amateur web
> application.  

Actually, you can develop a half-way decent web application, it's just
not going to scale to thousands of concurrent users.  But is an SMB
going to worry about that?  That's a great problem for them to have. 
An iSeries is *way* too expensive for them, and they don't think they
can write web apps for it.

> Programming is the only professional endeavor I can think of where you
> compare someone with no real world experience to someone with 20 years,
> and where someone who has been programming for a couple of years out of
> college has the temerity to tell someone with two decades of experience
> that they're wrong just because they're not following the latest
> buzzword.  

First of all, I don't think anyone here is suggesting that anyone
abandon what they know.  Build upon it, extend it.  You know how to
build a rock-solid back-end.  The business logic is already there. 
Extend your abilities to create that slick UI for it to keep your
users happy.  Buy PSC/400 if you can't do it on your own ;-)

The problem that Lim pointed out and I expounded on is that there are
serious barriers to entry for new RPG programmers.  Combine that with
the misconception that RPG is green-screen only and you're going to
see a dearth of new RPG programmers.  I don't know how we can combat
the difficulty of access to learning RPG, but we can certainly do
something about the notion that you are limited to 5250 as a
user-interface if you write RPG.

We show people in our company (as I said, we like to grow our own
programmers) that the iSeries and RPG programs power our website and
our intranet and they're astounded.  And they want to learn RPG.  Then
once they learn about why the iSeries is such a great platform and RPG
is such a great language, they're hooked.

Mike E.