Re: Why program in MI?

On 7/21/2014 10:28 AM, John R. Smith, Jr. wrote:

I'm a consultant. I want to spend my learning time where
it is going to pay off in a higher hourly rate.

That background helps me understand the question better. Thank you.

I am questioning the need to learn it because I have been an iSeries
programmer since 1992 and in my 22 years of employee and consulting time on
the machine, I have yet to meet anyone that programs in MI or at least no
one that talks about it. Since MI programmers seem to be that rare, I was
trying to figure out why I would want to learn it as opposed to learning
something else.

I don't personally find it an either/or sort of dilemma; MI isn't that
hard to grok.

Based on the comment "there are problems for which MI is a better fit than
RPG", can you give me some specifics?

I am primarily an application programmer. Green screen, printed report;
the dead centre of RPG's target demographic. Occasionally though, I do
find myself writing tools. I most recently used MI to solve a problem
proposed on the Midrange-L list: How to retrieve the object text from a
data area that was exclusively locked by another job? I went through
the OIR and got the text from there. Could I have used RPG? Sure.
DMPSYSOBJ, CPYSPLF and RPG to parse the dump. MI is the better fit.

If I were a consultant (I am not brave enough!) I probably would be
learning web programming as fast as I could. MI is not a good fit for
that problem space.
--buck

-----Original Message-----
From: C400-L [mailto:c400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Buck Calabro
Sent: Monday, July 21, 2014 10:08 AM
To: c400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [C400-L] Why program in MI?

On 7/18/2014 9:11 PM, John Smith wrote:

I was wondering why I should learn to program in MI.

I'm a simpleton, which exp,ains why I'm fascinated with these sorts of
questions. Why would you NOT learn to program in MI?

Is there stuff
that can be done with MI that can't be done with RPGLE?

Can, can't, meh.
There are problems for which MI is a better fit than RPG.
--buck