Re: RPG - I'm not dead yet!

Of course statistics are only numbers. But that's why I used trends over two years as a starting point. It's nice that they argue for my position, and I probably wouldn't have been move to write the article if they had been otherwise. But two years of data is pretty clear. And the reason I consider TIOBE pretty credible is that it has showed the absolute collapse of Visual Basic as a programming language. VB fanatics notwithstanding, the language is in as deep of decline as Perl, for similar reasons.

To get to the reasons RPG is a great language is to first understand two of the primary attributes of programming languages: process and typing. Process has to do with how the language flows, with the two primary categories being procedural and object-oriented. While OOP is an excellent technique for certain classes of programming, procedural programming is a better fit for most linear tasks, which make up a great majority of the business programming tasks we handle. Typing has to do with whether you know what's in a variable or not. With dynamically typed languages, a variable can be a string, a number, an object or nothing at all. With static languages you know the type and so your programming is more straightforward and a lot more programming errors can be caught at compile time.

In general, I consider statically typed procedural languages to be the best fit for data driven business rules. But so why RPG rather than, say, COBOL? Well, certainly a large part is my own bias. But objectively speaking the tight integration of RPG to the database is unmatched. There is a reason that dBase was so popular a language for so long. The fact that you can combine SQL and native access in one program makes RPG uniquely powerful.

I can go on and on. RPG continues to evolve and add features that make it as easy to use as is possible for a statically typed language. You have to do a little more up-front thinking, but it pays off in the end with easier debugging and maintenance.

In the end, when someone says that Language X is better than RPG, I just challenge them to write a serious business application like MRP or order processing. I'll do it in RPG and they can do it in the language of their choice. I'll have a faster, more fully featured, more easily maintainable system done in much less time than they will.

Joe

I like the article Joe, we all love it when someone talks up RPG. But
I don't think the statistics prove anything, you can read them how you
want. You could read that a minority of programmers are still using
RPG and always have. If you had done your article in 2010, how would
you have interpreted the sharp downward slope?! On the other hand, if
we sort the table on the delta column, RPG comes in second!

When I arrived at our shop in 2000 we had no internet site and
programmed uniquely in RPG with our PCs running windows 3.11. We were
all programmers, even the guy who took care of the system. Today, half
of us are still doing the same. The other half are new recrutes, web
programmers, administrators. We are gradually being squeezed out.
Anyway thanks for trying, I am always fascinated by your apparent love
for RPG even when I know that you are skilled in OOP languages. I'd
have liked your article to have given me some ammunition for when I
eat with one of the Java guys on Friday who is always telling me how
outdated and useless RPG is. As someone who learnt to program with
RPG, maybe I have difficulty in really appreciating its advantages
over other languages.

2011/7/6 Joe Pluta<joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

IBM i developers and RPG programmers in particular may enjoy an article
of mine that MC Press just published. It's a comparison of the trends
of various programming languages based on the TIOBE index. Understand
that TIOBE primarily measures the popularity of a language in various
search engines and so doesn't necessarily correlate to use in the real
world. But it does provide a glimpse into what programmers consider to
be hot, and the results are pretty interesting.

http://www.mcpressonline.com/programming/rpg/practical-rpg-the-future-of-rpg.html

Joe
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