RE: Legacy question

From: Buck

I think that in general, vendors tend to be more interested in table
driven systems than companies writing software for their own consumption.

Absolutely.  And this is the exact same argument for "platform independence"
or "database independence".

While I suppose you can argue that a given business might decide to
completely abandon a perfectly good platform in order to jump on another
cheaper one, the chances are that if you have something that works you're
going to stick with it.  The only time you might switch is if your system is
no longer supported (and even that doesn't stop some companies!).

So, do you code "lowest common functionality" code so that you might
possibly be able to switch "seamlessly" (and I use that term VERY loosely)
to another platform, or do you take advantage of the strengths of your
platform until such time as when you have to switch?

Certainly you can code with an eye toward isolating some code that is
platform specific, but of course in the case of RPG, the entire language is
pretty much language specific.  So then the question is whether you continue
to use RPG until some possible future time when it is no longer supported,
or do you switch to some "common" implementation, such as Java and SQL, in
the hopes that when you do have to switch, that the implementation you chose
is supported by some other platform.

In general, I don't think you can even write code that will not go out of
date.  With the exception of the IBM midrange, there isn't a platform out
there that I can think of where 20 year old code runs without a hitch.  In
the Windows world, a lot of code goes out of date in ten or even five years.
Heck, if you had designed a business application in Java ten years ago,
you'd have probably used an applet.  Five years ago it would have been EJBs.
Three years ago you would have used Struts as your user interface.  All of
those technologies are dead.

The chances of picking a technology that will be around in 20 years is
pretty much zero... unless it's RPG on the midrange.

Joe