RE: Help! Boss wants to know why ILE?

Wow! Thank you all for the feedback! It took me some time to read
through all the replies this morning and I can't guarantee I'll hit on
everything but even if I don't reply directly know that I appreciate your
taking the time to answer my question.

You have received a lot of good pointers from everyone (!) on the list.
Yes I did! Thank you all! =)

By the way, what's the staff's (and boss') take on /free format? .-)
At the moment our staff is myself, my boss, another Senior P/A, a mid-lvl
P/A, and a consultant. I'm the only one who uses /free or WDSC, although
I have the other Senior guy started on /free. Luckily he likes new
techniques and is not of the "crotchety old-AS/400" mindset. =) I doubt
anyone else will come around to it though. Personally, I love /free! I've
coded in many languages throughout the years and writing RPG /free makes
me feel "normal", like I'm writing java or asp, or anything else not
constrained to 80 characters in set positions. Sure, I know it's not
completely free but it makes me happy. =)

In a serious business application (a stock picking program, for example)
written with the ILE mindset, you'll want to create 30 or 40
subprocedures, and control them from a main procedure. The business logic
will be in a separate module from the display logic, and the database
logic may also be separate.

Do you really want to write 40 separate non-ILE *PGM objects, and then try
to maintain them?

Your boss is right... ILE doesn't provide anything you couldn't do before
with program calls. You can write modular applications without ILE. ILE
just makes them much, much, easier to write and maintain.
This is basically the argument that everyone on the list has made in a
nutshell, that while it can be done via programs and workarounds, ILE is
an environment specifically designed to make modular programming easier
and faster. I think that's the best way to sell it to my boss, as long as
we are committed to modular programming standards here already, (via
external programs and table-driven data), then it makes more sense to
switch completely to the environment that supports our efforts.

I have copied quite a few of the responses into a word doc that I will
forward on to her. The explanations all of you gave me were excellent.

I didn't see what would be one of my favorite arguments. Shared code by
outside develops. There's tons of great code out there on the web (much of
it written by the talented contributors on this list).
Yeah, that's how I started with ILE - Scott's articles on POI. I had
soooo much fun creating an excel spreadsheet. =) Thanks Scott, (and
everyone else), for letting me "borrow" your ILE code. Without it I doubt
I would have learned as much as I have about coding ILE.