RE: Our OO Verus Procdedural Discussions and New Forum

["Clapham, Paul" <pclapham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<quote>
on a more empirical basis than simply "OO vs. procedural".  Especially since
a small but growing contingent of Java programmers have introduced the very
confusing concept of "procedural Java".
</quote>

Not confusing when you look at it this way: programming languages break down
into two categories, declarative and procedural. Declarative languages are
languages like HTML and XSLT where you simply declare what you want to
happen in a particular circumstance, and procedural languages are languages
like RPG and Java where you tell the computer how to make it happen. Of
course there are grey areas in this; for example XSLT has procedural-like
templates where you say "this, then this, then this" and RPG has
declarative-like features such as the report cycle; but the classification
is pretty clear.

When you look at it this way, rather than "procedural versus
object-oriented" (which I find confusing), you see that you are discussing
features of two procedural languages. What do object-oriented languages have
that RPG doesn't? As far as I can see the main difference is that OO gives
you inheritance and the abstractions that go along with it.

I've been working on and maintaining RPG for a long time now (over 20 years)
and I've been using Java for 3 or 4 years. Every time I work on something in
our RPG-based system I ask myself whether I could do it better in Java. So
far I have not come across anything that cries out for a class hierarchy.
Sure, there have been a few things that definitely work better in Java (XML
being one of them) but they generally only require calling a Java class to
do that work.

However I very much suspect that if I were working on a large Java
application running on the iSeries, and I were continually asking myself
whether I could do it better in RPG, I might not answer yes very often to
that either. Although when I was working on our web application (where
customers connect directly to our system) I did find a case where updating
the database was much easier via an RPG service program than via Java and
SQL; this was partially due to the fact that the tables weren't normalized
properly.

PC2