RE: RPG - I'm not dead yet!

Joe said:> 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,

This is not correct, OO has nothing to do with flow.
An OO language has constructs which help with encapsulation, or "information hiding".Not much more, but nothing less.You can program "procedural" if you want, in Java, whatever that means.If you mean "imperative", there is no difference (you can make one big main method if you want).
You can also practice encapsulation in RPG, which you do using modules etc.Its just that it doesn't have OO constructs and as such it is a less capable language to do "information hiding".Which, IMHO, should be the most important capability of any programming language.

But OO features are misused often.Eg thinking you don't program procedural in Java, but you do.A classic example is transferring an amount from account 1 to account 2.The wrong way to do this is trying to "objectify" things, seeing OO as an end, instead of a means.And trying to slap nice little "self contained" methods on objects.Instead, in this example, you should keep the account objects simple.And use a "transfer" object with one - maybe big - "procedural" method, which implements the business process.Not much different from RPG, except in RPG we don't have nice simple "account" objects.

Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2011 10:14:03 -0500> From: joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: 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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