Re: Death of the RPG Programmer

I don't think I have done this on this list yet so...  here goes....

RANT(*ON)

And SQL by nature is slower than direct record access.  But as time goes on,
that difference is negligible.  Compared to the costs that follow.

Look at the maintenance.  The external descriptions are great.  But when the
record changes you maintain the code.  Maintenance burns the MOST money.  It
IS cheaper to upgrade the hardware.  Except for 400 disks maybe.  So SQL...

The idea is that the hardware costs less.  The software costs more.  This is
not news.

Death of RPG programmer?

COME ON!!!

OH, yeah, I remember now.  The COBOL programmer is dead!  Long live the
COBOL programmer!  (GEEZ!  The 70's again!)

Java does what it does.  COBOL _STILL_ does what it does, regardless of the
400's RPG slant.  Linux does what it does (which is networking, hands down,
regardless of your 400 blinders).

A language is a TOOL. You ADD it to your toolbox and move on.  But you still
take it out when you need it.  It is what separates the professionals from
the hacks.  I own air driven nailers.  When I rebuilt the porch, they paid
for themselves three times over, but when I built the birch CD cabinet, they
stayed in the box.

A hack makes the money today, but the professional makes the money all the
way through.

RPG II, RPG III, RPG IV, COBOL 68, COBOL74, COBOL 85, PL/I, Lisp, Prolog,
Smalltalk, Pascal, C, C++, Fortran, Java, Perl, Python, Forth, Basic, Rexx,
C shell scripts, Bourne shell scipts, Korn shell scripts, GPSS (damn, I
can't remember the number that follows this, maybe "V"?), and some Prime
language for PrimeOS that looked a lot like REXX...

I have them all in my toolbox.  Some I pull out more that others.

If all you know is RPG, then every box starts to look like a 400.

But take a hard look around.  They are not.  Even IBM, the mother of
mainframes says that it is a heterogenous environment.

Problems are problems and this thread is not a problem in the community, it
is a problem in narrowness.

Platforms come and go.  Tie yourself to ONLY one platform, and your career
is over almost as soon as it begins.

Death of the RPG programmer?  Only if you commit suicide.

But NO... let's burn some bandwidth with how soon we will all be gone...

RANT(*OFF)


===========================================================
R. Bruce Hoffman, Jr.
 -- IBM Certified AS/400 Professional System Administrator
 -- IBM Certified AS/400 Professional Network Administrator
 -- IBM Certified Specialist AS/400 V4R4 Administration

"The sum of all human knowledge is a fixed constant.
    It's the population that keeps growing!"

-----Original Message-----
From: Joel Fritz <JFritz@sharperimage.com>
To: 'MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com' <MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
Date: Tuesday, June 13, 2000 7:49 PM
Subject: RE: Death of the RPG Programmer


>IBM has claimed that optimizing at level 40 should make Java perform as
>though it were compiled.  I think that's stretching it a bit.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Erick Garske [mailto:erick@formationmg.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2000 3:35 PM
>To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
>Subject: RE: Death of the RPG Programmer
>
>
>Java would by nature be slower than RPG because its interpetive.
>
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