Re: RPG easier/harder to use than other languages?

On 7/3/2017 12:42 PM, Bradley Stone wrote:

RPG with a nice toolkit like CGIDEV2 or eRPG SDK is a great web
application tool, especially if your data is on an IBM i.

Does this make RPG the strongest web dev language?

Compared to what on the IBM i? Net.Data? WebSphere?

In the case of my organisation, .NET running on Microsoft Windows. The
web team get the data via stored procs (mostly) and it took time
convincing management that the web people didn't need ODBC direct to DB2
tables.

And what skillset does our programmer have? Before we can say x or y
is the strongest web dev language there are a lot of parameters to
define.

Yes, the thread is a bit vague on 'easier than what?' which is why I
figured I'd throw something out to spur discussion. Thank you! The web
is a useful launch point because that's where things are going.
Further, the... the ecosystem is different. Instead of CL/DDS/RPG/SQL,
it's HTML/JSON/AJAX/script language. That's where I was most interested
to draw out the 'easier to do what?' question. Because it ought to be
clear by now that RPG isn't the one and only element in the mix, unlike
some batch A/R process where there may not even be printer files!

If we say an RPG programmer using an IBM i that also knows HTML, JS
and CSS, I'd say RPG in a heartbeat.

There's a legitimate judgement call here, and no 'one size fits all' answer.

IBM never got behind RPG as a web programming language.

This was huge and sad.

If we look at it in a ratio of RPG programmers to say, .Net, there are
fewer RPG programmers by far, so fewer examples, documentation and
tutorials. ie, a smaller audience.

I think a big difference is the... willingness of the
.NET/PHP/Python/Ruby/etc community to share, mentor, and help each
other. We haven't yet built that community, although this list is
definitely the germ of that community.