RE: ADVERTISING SUPPORT/ComputerWorld 7/28 - LONG

The think about JAVA is that it is our industry's decease of the week, this 
week.

A few years ago, it was OO, then C++, now Java. None of these things will 
help the AS/400, and while I don't know Bruce Bond, I think the idea of 
giving up RPG for Java is, well, in a word, STUPID!

Yes, learning Java is fine. I love learning. I encourage learning. But most 
of these blanket statements telling use successful AS/400 developers to 
stop using X in order to use Y is stupid. Where are these new decease of 
the week coming from? They come from the rest of the industry. The unstable 
industry. Their applications keep not working so they keep coming up with 
ways to get the job of programming out of the programmer's hands. Yes they 
write cool embedded systems, in things like the USRobotics PalmPilot, or 
the Mars Sojourner rover, but they do not like to write general purpose 
business applications.

General Purpose Business applications need stable easy to read, and 
manipulate languages like RPG, COBOL, and PL/I. Java pretty close to an 
okay, stable language and perhaps it will become another COBOL or RPG. But 
did the COBOL programmers give up COBOL when RPG on the AS/400 become 
popular? Did the RPG programmers give up RPG when C became popular on the 
AS/400? Some did, but the other 99.9 percent did not.

Today, again in my opinion, Java is a brain-dead language that requires 
entirely too much coding to do a simple interactive application. This is 
not to say that it may not become a good language at some point, but today 
it isn't as useful as magazine writers an analyst say it is. After all, we 
all get board with the same thing day in and day out. We get board with 
green screen terminals, so we get color, we get board with color and we get 
graphical (OOPS, Rochester still can spell graphical yet.. sorry <g>). The 
people writing magazine article and doing lectures get really board talking 
about something that "just works". It is much more exciting to write about 
the newest and greatest stuff. It is very boring to write about the RPG 
cycle, or the CHAIN opcode.

We as developers get board too. We have the unique opportunity, within our 
industry, to actually change our careers without changing our profession. 
That is if we get board with RPG, we can go do something else, such as work 
for Microsoft. Those opportunities are there for us, but for others, it is 
much more difficult.

Businesses are in the business of making money, and staying in business to 
make money. The AS/400 is still the most reliable system (in my opinion) of 
any system ever built, no exceptions. If you're using RPGIII, RPG IV or 
COBOL to make you business applications work, great!  If you're using 
something else, well that's great too.

But a blanket statement that says to move to Java or C or Rexx, or 
whatever, is just dumb. Virtually nobody cares if those languages are 
technically superior to RPG IV. If we really cared about things like that 
in this industry, we'd all be using OS/2 on our ThinkPads (or better yet, 
OS/400 <g>).

The fact is, RPG IV works, RPGIII is still the workhorse of our industry. 
Just because a few developers, magazine writers and analysts are board with 
it, doesn't make Java or anything else any better at doing general purpose 
business applications.

The difficult part of our job as RPG programmers, is to get IBM Rochester 
and Toronto to understand that we like RPG, we like the AS/400. We use it 
because we like it and it works!  The rest of the industry may have this or 
that bell or whistle, but the AS/400 is were its at. And the AS/400 means 
RPG, because "RPG IV, it just works!"

Bob Cozzi



On Thursday, August 14, 1997 12:52 PM, James W. Kilgore 
[SMTP:qappdsn@IBM.NET] wrote:
> mcrump@ballfoster.com wrote:
> >
> <snip>
> > But at the same time, IBM's push to make the AS/400 a Java
> > machine gives Java developers a way to program on the AS/400.
> >
> > For example, Gartner Group, Inc. analyst Bruce Bond
> > recommends that AS/400 shops stop programming in
> > RPG, the box's traditional midrange programming language,
> > in favor of newer methods such as Java.
> >
> Thanks..we've downloaded the Java developers kit from the IBM site.
>
> This does bring up an interesting point...if to fill the AS/400 skill
> void Java programmers are brought in, what happens to the demand for
> staff skilled in legacy RPG code?  It would appear that the educational
> push is toward operational/tuning skills (OS/400) and new language
> skills.
>

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