On 4 April 2015 at 06:21, Brian Parkins <goodprophet.bp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'd like to pose this question to the community. How much would YOU be
prepared to pay out of YOUR pocket for RDi?
tl;dr I'd pay what IBM are asking for RDi 9.1, but I'd try to find a discount.
That's an interesting question, and it parallels 'Would you yourself
pay to go to an RPG-specific conference?' History is eloquent on that
for the midrange ecosphere.
One big problem is that there is no real competition for RDi.
Everything else is makeshift. They are plenty good enough at editing
- raw typing - but they are woefully ignorant of RPG, IBM i debug and
source members. So for me, the decision tree looks like this:
Can I afford RDi? Yes, at this stage of my career, I can.
If not, can I live with the deficiencies in commercial editors meant
for Java or C? I myself probably can't.
Poor RPG programmer compromise: WDSC 7. It understands IBM i source
members, down and uploading to the PC, submitting compiles, matching
IF/END properly, and that glorious SEP debugger.
If I could live with the deficiencies of other editors and I had
money, UltraEdit looks pretty good at US $99 per version upgrade. I'd
need the Compare and Find, so it's more like US $180 per version
upgrade, or US $99 per year. UE has an in-built FTP, so that helps
with source member down/upload.
If I had a budget of zero and could live with other editors, I'd use
Notepad++ with the FTP plugin.
It will be interesting to see other answers, but I guess I haven't
answered the actual question in the spirit it was asked. If RDi were
volunteerware, and each programmer could pay what she thought it is
worth to her, I'd set that price at the cost of a good 17 inch laptop
replaced every 3 years. Current laptop price is about US $1000, so
say $300 per year for RDi. I think that's more than the current SWMA
price.
--buck
midrange.com
