Re: Modernization

Hmmm, as someone who turns 40 this year and has only been an RPG 
programmer for about 12 yrs I have to concur with you that many RPG 
programmers are still living in the "good 'ol days" of RPG II+ and that 
ANY sort of upgrading, be it /FREE or .NET would carry with it a massive 
learning curve.  However, I don't agree that it is entirely their 
fault....IBM has not made the transition easy for RPG programmers.  Their 
"roadmap" is worthless as a navigation tool even when they aren't changing 
their minds every five minutes on just what language is going to be the 
next big breakthrough for the AS/400, or Iseries, or I5 or whatever the 
hell they're calling it today.

Websphere?  Web cluster-$%#!  It's a resource hogging nightmare that is 
poorly explained, poorly implemented, and covers so many things under one 
brand name it's amazing they can fit it all under one umbrella.  It's like 
Nabisco naming their entire product line "food" and packaging it all up 
together.  You wouldn't know what to buy when you got to the store.

Tutorials?  Redbooks?  IBM certified training?  Sure, it's there and 
useful to some degree but there are so many pieces to the IBM puzzle it's 
near impossible to get a real bottoms-up idea of where to start and where 
to go.  Every other language/platform seems to have pretty clear cut 
tutorials and directions.

Whew!  Sorry for the rant.  Guess I got a little carried away.  =)

That's not to say I don't put much of the responsibility on us, the 
programmers, because I do.  I'd just like to see IBM do it's part too and 
I don't feel that they are.

As for retirement, that's one of the great benefits of our profession - we 
can "retire" to a beach somewhere with a laptop part-time and still make 
money.  =)


message: 7
date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:14:47 -0500
from: "DeLong, Eric" <EDeLong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] Modernization

LOL, I'll agree that the learning curve is tremendous, but I fail to see 
how jumping to .net would aleviate that pressure.  The problem with 
changing paradigms is that we RPG programmers have tended to wall 
ourselves off from the "outside world", preferring to focus on delivering 
software in the same fashion we did twenty years ago.  We left ourselves 
behind, and now we must either embrace the new ways, or limp along with 
the old.  One approach opens new doors, the other closes them.....

IBM has perhaps given us too much in the WDSCi tooling.  I too use only a 
small portion of the available tooling, and am struggling to learn my way 
to the productivity gains IBM has promised.  However, I count this as MY 
deficiency, not IBM's, and continue to challenge my assumptions about 
software development and the tools I should use.  WDSCi lite goes a long 
way toward making the new tooling more useful to a broad range of 
programmers....  I expect to see an end to the DSPF/PRTF dilemma soon 
enough for it to not matter....  Bringing SOA into the bag of tricks might 
take a bit longer....

I'm not 40 yet (soon enough, though), so I don't have the luxury of 
retirement to buffer my career.  With 22 years of experience on this 
platform, I hope that I can stay with the System i family until that time 
arrives, but to do so requires me to forge ahead.  I must learn to think 
differently about architecture, about best practices and programming 
standards that improve the quality of software I write. 

later,
Eric