Re: Our OO Verus Procdedural Discussions and New Forum

Paul wrote:

>Group,
>
>IMHO:
>
>The issue of OO versus procedural programming approaches is a subject 
with
>industry and iSeries AD wide ramifications.  Simply put, the issue is the
>fundamental building block of all that we do as developers.  This issue 
and
>it?s ramifications are of the highest significance due to these along 
with
>other factors.

Shucks Paul, you're making me blush! I thought it was a good idea when I 
proposed it, but I'm not sure it's quite so earth shaking. This topic has 
been discussed and studied for years in CS departments all over the world. 
It's usually considered to be under the domain of Software Engineering 
when you sign up for a graduate course at your local engineering school. 
The IEEE and the ACM do have quite a few case studies that could be looked 
at if you are curious.

What hasn't been done, to my knowledge (and I may have missed it), is a 
direct comparison of RPG and Java. This is likely because OS/400 is hardly 
a blip on the radar to most Comp Sci departments. It just doesn't have 
enough traction with CS professors and grad students, unless you're going 
to school in Minnesota (quickly ducking the rotten tomatoes from my 
Rochester co-workers -)). When I took a course at IIT in comparative 
operating systems, the prof was begging anyone to take OS/400 as a study 
project. No one did (this was before I began working with iSeries). 
Perhaps the situation has changed a bit in the last 10 years, but you just 
don't see much about RPG outside of midrange publications. This is why I 
think what we are proposing is useful. I have to agree with Joe, I don't 
think anyone has found a documented, repeatable, order of magnitude 
difference between mainstream application oriented languages. Now that 
said, if we were to compare putting up a web site in PHP vs doing it 
entirely in Intel assembler CGI programs, you might come close to that. 
But I do think you could find 25% to 50% differences, I've seen those 
myself between C and Java.

Joe, you also have to admit that significant work has been done using Java 
and Smalltalk. Maybe not an MRP system, but I think Eclipse, IntelliJ 
IDEA,Together, the Visual Age IDEs, and JBoss all qualify as very 
significantly large development projects. They may not do schedule 
forecasting, but the math involved in a graphical inheritance tree 
automatic layout program such as Together-J had is probably beyond what 
you see in an MRP module. For those of you who don't know, Together (which 
may not be around any more, I don't know) was a CASE tool that let you 
create your designs in UML and would then generate the corresponding Java 
code. But Unlike the Rational products, Together went back and forth all 
the time between graphical UML and Java. The UML repository WAS the Java 
code.

Now on to my real point here. If this is half as important as Paul thinks 
it is, and I do think it has a fair amount of merit, is there any chance 
we could get an organization like IBM to kick in a little support? Maybe a 
server or some BBS or site management software. Or perhaps maybe just some 
impartial judges from the vast RPG and Java experience that they have in 
Rochester. I'm going to be in Rochester myself this month, and if any one 
from IBM would like to talk, I'm all ears. I think the suggestion of a 
wikki style site is a pretty good one. Joe needs to work for a living, and 
this is a big job. Can anyone help out?

_________________________________________________________________
Jeff Furgal / MIMIX User Interface Product Architect / Lakeview Technology

furgalj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx / 630-282-8360

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