RPG IV -- MIDRANGE-L

Jon,
        You say that the conversion process for gong from RPG III to RPG IV 
(not 
full-blow ILE) is about 5 days.  What educational resources did you use to 
accomplish this?  Please advise.  Thank you.

Eric Kempter
CommAir Mechanical Services, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From:   Jon.Paris@halinfo.it [SMTP:Jon.Paris@halinfo.it]
Sent:   Tuesday, November 24, 1998 8:41 AM
To:     Don
Cc:     midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject:        Re: *** ADMIN: Ok, one more time, a POLL on www.midrange.com

OK Don - I'll bite.

 >Reasons not using RPG IV include:

 >No business reason to do the conversion.

I'm constantly hearing about the RPG programmer shortage.  I would have
thought that a language that has a minimal to non-existent learning curve
but brings significant productivity increases is reason enough.  I would
say it's hard to find a business reason _not_ to do the conversion.  Also
in this category, you're locking yourself out of almost everything new on
the system - IBM are not going to go on building CALL type APIs.

Many people on this list complain about IBM lack of marketing etc. (and I
agree with that) but sometimes I wonder if this "it ain't broke so don't
touch it" attitude also contributes to the view of the box as "old
fashioned" (my turn to run and duck now <grin>)

 >Why all the extra DASD to do the same thing I'm doing now?

By taking the option to compress observability I can finish up with lower
DASD usage.  Even without that you have to have a lot of programs to use up
a significant amount of space.  Again the trade off is productivity against
hardware.  DASD is a hell of a lot cheaper than the hourly cost of your
brain.

 >Why all the extra hardware to do the same thing I'm doing now?  (Based on
 >extra memory/cpu needed to push these new puppies)

This varies and I've yet to meet anyone who thought that the increase was
not worth the effort.  Admittedly this depends on your hardware - it's more
likely to present a problem on CISC than RISC.  However, if this was the
only criteria, everyone would still be using DOS or Win 3.1

 >Why the extra learning curve to do what I have now and what works now?

What learning curve ?  Absolute outside it is 4 to 5 days to use the
compiler in compatibility mode.  Note that I'm not advocating that everyone
switch to full ILE etc. - but every journey starts with a single step.

 >And, you'll see that alot of this also applies to your JAVA question...

Here I really have to strongly disagree with you.  We're talking about a
situation where there is no conversion available (and you probably wouldn't
want it anyway since we're talking about OO versus procedural) compared
with a simple command that does it for you.  We're talking about the
difference in learning curve of 5 days (I'm being generous) versus 3 to 6
months.  I fully understand that a switch to Java does indeed need a real
good reason. Also other RPG programmers will undoubtedly be able to read
your RPG IV even if they haven't been "converted".  They wouldn't be able
to read your Java.  Sorry but this is a "chalk and cheese" comparison.


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