Re: RPG naming

Interesting article Joe.  Will IBM provide any information, especially in
the area of migrations?  My experience, limited as it is, says that many of
these conversions have been declared a victory, but only after expectations
were dramatically lowered.  

Another slant to this issue that I have seen is the impact of employee
turnover in these situations.  When a conversion goes sour, heads roll.  New
people are brought in, new money pumped in, and the cycle is begun again. 
After a couple of these cycles, and a system that is nearly broken, a new
low level of performance is established and from then on each new
performance plateau is heralded as the new wave.  Five years later the
system again has much (but not all) of its original functions & features,
and victory is declared.  

As to RPG being renamed,  I must admit that I like the current naming schema
  RPG-IV says it all.  Every 15 years it changes so much it needs a new name
 but it is backwards compatible, so IV is the proper suffix for now.  It
does surprise me though that the /free ability was not enough to change the
name to RPG-V?.
 
---------------------------------
Booth Martin
http://www.martinvt.com
---------------------------------
-------Original Message-------
 
From: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Date: 10/11/05 07:38:58
To: 'RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries'
Subject: RPG naming
 
At the risk of slightly pounding my own drum:
 
MCPressOnline just published my latest article, this one on why RPG is
not quite dead yet, and in fact is one of the most powerful and most
evolving languages available today.
 
Several readers chimed in both in email and in the forums, and the issue
of renaming RPG came up a couple of times.  I had a sudden inspiration
and I answered that maybe we should call it DB2/PL!  SQL has its own
processing language, and for the longest time, RPG has been DB2's
processing language (long before the database was even called DB2, in
fact).
 
Think of it.  It's reminiscent of SQL/PL, which is hot, hot, hot these
days.  It ties the language to a pretty highly respected database,
instead of to Report Generation.  And it opens up the possibility of
porting down the road.  In fact, if all you have is embedded SQL, it
shouldn't be too hard to enhance VARPG to generate the appropriate code
for any database.  Things like CHAIN are a little more problematic, but
that's a different issue for a different day.
 
Anyway, just thoughts.  If you want to check it out, the article is
here:
 
http://www.mcpressonline.com/mc?1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@.6b2a7977
 
Joe
 
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