RE: Resistance to change (was free format question)

James,

What's your point?  You'd be more appt to use ILE RPG IV techniques if the 
called it something besides RPG?

I agree that ILE RPG IV is different enough from RPG that IBM could have given 
it a completely new name.  In fact, that might of been quite beneficial.  
Instead of people hearing "RPG Developer" and thinking "green screen, 
monolithic, costly to modify applications".  They could hear, oh how about 
"Lightning Developer" so they think "high speed, easily maintained, modular 
applications, with your choice of UI."

Yeah, that would be sweet.

Instead, IBM chose to emphasize the similarities and the ease of migration 
between RPG III and RPG IV.

I assume, one reason for this emphasis was to convince people to migrate.

Doesn't seem to have worked very well.  To bad they didn't just rename it.  But 
hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

Charles Wilt
--
iSeries Systems Administrator / Developer
Mitsubishi Electric Automotive America
ph: 513-573-4343
fax: 513-398-1121
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of James H H Lampert
> Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 11:00 AM
> To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
> Subject: Re: Resistance to change (was free format question)
> 
> 
> In my case, it's not "resistance to change"; if it were 
> that, then why am I fluent, to varying degrees, in 3 
> assemblers and over a dozen HLLs, in multiple dialetcs?
> 
> What I DO resist, and resist vigorously, is the practice 
> of evolving a langauge to where it has lost all the 
> defining characteristics of the one it evolved from, but 
> continuing to call it what it no longer is. For example, 
> BASIC is a language, evolved from FORTRAN, that requires 
> line numbers, uses them as statement labels, and has no 
> local variables or external calls. The QBASICs TBASICS, 
> and so forth, evolved from BASIC, but are NOT themselves 
> BASIC, having lost every characteristic that defines 
> BASIC, and I refuse to call them BASIC. They are 
> DERIVATIVES of BASIC, not DIALECTS.
> 
> Likewise, RPG has a highly stylized syntax based on column 
> positions, and it also has excellent file I/O, and an 
> implicit "DO UNTIL LR IS TRUE" loop surrounding every 
> program. If you don't bother learning how to use The 
> Cycle, though, then there's little reason for you to be 
> using RPG at all, and if you take away the 
> column-position-based syntax, you may end up with a great 
> language, but it has ceased to be RPG.
> 
> --
> JHHL
> -- 
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