Re: EGL: Integration or Migration?

john e wrote:

Again Joe, you are saying that a procedural language is much more capable
to respond to business change than a OO language. I really have to object
(nu pun intended) to this generalization which is completely false and misleading.

Actually, it's not false. The problem has to do with being able to respond to change in the business world. OO languages, especially those with strong typing, work best for static problem sets: that is, situations where the rules don't change. That's because you can create a class hierarchy that depicts the situation today and not worry about it. The single worst thing you can do in OO is make the wrong dependencies, and no matter how good you are, radically changing business rules can invalidate your dependencies, thus necessitating a restructuring of your class hierarchy, which is the single most expensive operation in the programming world - certainly more expensive than a simple database change, which is the worst thing that will happen in a procedural world.

An OO language has more features than a procedural one to organize you're code into self contained modules and to make abstractions. Now, with these features you
you also have more possibilities to make a compete mess with random dependencies all over. And this happens a lot in practice.

I disagree. If you're talking about the perfect world, then a good RPG programmer can do just as much abstraction using called programs and procedures as an OO programmer. The only OO feature that can't be easily mimicked is inheritance, and inheritance is exactly what leads to the rigidness I spoke of above. That's why most modern OO experts lean towards composition rather than inheritance.

Anyway, RPG on the "i" is, in practice, much more productive than Java
on the "i". But this is NOT due to the OO capabilities of Java. To say that
procedural languages are much more capable of responding to business
changes is simply misleading.

Not in my experience. OO is just another tool and it has strengths and weaknesses. It's primary weakness is that it reacts poorly to radical changes in requirements. That's what makes it less appealing for developing dynamic business rules.

In fact, when OO concepts are applied with
care and thought, it's the other way around (ever wonder why most - or
all - popular languages all have OO features, even PHP?).

No, I don't wonder why. It's because most programmers aren't business programnmers. Ever wonder why there aren't many ERP packages written in Java? Ever hear about the San Francisco project?

The most popular BUSINESS languages are still COBOL and RPG. And SQL. Not an object among them.

I'm not saying that a dedicated team of Java experts couldn't put together a decent business application over time. I'm just a saying that a few RPG programmers could do it a lot faster.

Joe