RE: IBM pushing Java

[Colin Williams <Williamsc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was having this very argument with a collegue at work last week. The
boss is thinking of bring in Java AND HAS ALL thes great ideas, and says
everything in the garder is going to be lovely if we could just sprinkle
everything with JAVA! But at the end of the day , the old computing rule
still stands , no matter what you progranm in CICO, Crap in CRAP OUT!!

                -----Original Message-----
                From:   John Carr [mailto:74711.77@compuserve.com]
                Sent:   Sunday, March 21, 1999 3:06 PM
                To:     Midrange-L
                Subject:        Re: IBM pushing Java

                Date:   3/21/99  1:33 AM

                RE:     Re: IBM pushing Java

                From: boothm@ibm.net
                >I have a question along these lines:  I refer to much
of the old code that
                >I see as being brittle.  I don't know exactly why I
started using that term 
                >but it does seem appropriate.  Touch something, and
something breaks 
                >somewhere else.  change a line of code!
                >and suddenly some whole section starts behaving
differently. 

                >Have others noticed this?  Does this word make sense to
others, or am I 
                >speaking badly?  It is important to me because I feel
we must constantly
                >fight against this brittleness or suddenly we have
applications that are
                >no longer useful or repairable.  

                >Its usually at this point that I hear the "We need some
PCs to do this" 
                >speech.

                Booth

                One of my early mentor's Robin Chakivarti(I spelled it
wrong), used to say
                that "Our systems absorb change about as well as a
battleship absorbs 
                torpedos"

                That's what you mean about brittleness.  Does the
average RPG programmer 
                know anything about "Module Cohesiveness" ?  Like,
what's the difference
                between "TEMPORALLY COHESIVE" and "FUNCTIONALLY
COHESIVE" ?  This is the 
                idea behind OO.  Things like Encapsulation and
Abstraction are ususally
                not in the front brain of most RPG programmers.  

                Even though languages like Java are more geared to
implement these concepts,
                I would beg to argue that the tenets of OO (like the
terms above) can
                be implemented in RPG.  

                We just generally write "Bad" code.  But generally it's
not the language's 
                fault.  Sure, if you want to write bad systems, RPG will
do it's part
                to really help you.  (just like COBOL would)

                I maintain that if you take the average programmer's
design paradigms
                and give her/him Java,  You will get crap.

                Power-tools can be used for Power-mutilazation

                I'm doing a session in Boston next week(and Toronto Next
month)
                on this topic.   Called RPG & Maintainability.  I go
into these
                topics with examples.

                If we design our systems in a "Functionally Cohesive"
way, 
                (Even in RPG) they will not be "Brittle"

                John Carr
                EdgeTech
                Have Classes, Will Travel


                   at 09:56 AM, John Carr <74711.77@compuserve.com>
said:
                BTW,  With that management attitude,  How come you still
aren't useing 
                >RPGII ?    And I bet they are the same Management who
complain about 
                >their applications are getting older.

                >John Carr
                >EdgeTech
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