Re: Clarify AS/Set? -- BPCS-L

I have found that AS/SET increases my productivity by orders of magnitude,
particularly when working with subfiles.

Even though our customization/modification level is probably less than 20% 
overall of BPCS, it is still an effective tool.

As far as your Y2K consultants are concerned, they are full of a substance 
best not described in direct terms, and yes, they certainly appear to be 
preserving future contracts.  No doubt, THEY have AS/SET.

Since large portions of BPCS are AS/SET programs, and the AS/SET source 
is available to you from SSA, it certainly makes sense to have the same tool 
SSA's "programmers" (and I use the term loosely, most of these guys have 
NEVER used RPG and in fact think "RPG" means "Refrigerated Produce 
Goods") use to build BPCS.  If you have to modify an AS/SET program, it is 
VERY helpful to have ADK.  Otherwise you get to spend hours with interactive 
debug and a million printed pages of source code, just to figure out what the 
work fields are used for.

If I had to choose between AS/SET and ROBOT, I'd get AS/SET and then use it 
to write my own purge utility.  TAATOOLS are nice to have, but you can 
duplicate most of the function yourself, if you have to.

To quote Scott Adams:  con + insult = consult

To quote an old freind of mine:  "A consultant is a guy who borrows your watch 
to tell you what time it is, then keeps the watch."

> My understanding is that SSA uses this CASE tool to generate BPCS code 
> and
> programmers who are skilled in its use are more productive by an order of
> magnitude of perhaps 100 times, than equally talented programmers working with
> RPG CL DDS UIM & an alphabet soup of the other specialized pieces.
> 
> I put it on my wish list to management, along with ROBOT & TAATOOLS and enough
> hard disk for commitment control.  I did not get any of that ... if I could
> get just one, which is best for all users benefit?
> 
> I did not get AS/Set because our Y2K consultants told my boss that AS/Set was
> for software houses doing heavy duty software development work like whole new
> modules & applications, not the kind of tailoring & tinkering & adding a few
> fields hither thither that we are likely to need.  Cynical me thinks they were
> setting themselves up for more future contracts with them that will cost my
> employer much more than AS/Set.
> 
> Am I out of touch with reality?
> 
> Case in point.  I need to make some relatively trivial modifications to ORD590
> which looks to me to be a collection of AS/Setized programs that are extremely
> difficult to reverse-engineer what the code is doing.  Many of the software
> objects are 1000 pages of uncompiled code, without internal documentation of
> any significance.
> 
> Al Macintyre
> Central Industries of Indiana
> Newcomer to RPG/400 but decades of experience on prior RPG such as S/36
> +---

---------------------------
Christopher J. Devous
Director of Systems Development
The Antigua Group, Inc.
cdevous@antigua.com
http://www.antigua.com
----------------------------
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