Re: Death of the RPG Programmer

[boldt@xxxxxxxxxx]

"R. Bruce Hoffman, Jr." wrote:
> 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)


Bravo!

Wednesday I returned to work after a 3.5 week long vacation in
Europe.  The first thing I read after I resubscribed to this
mailing list was this thread ("Death of the RPG Programmer").

Gawd!  I felt like hopping on the next plane back to Frankfurt!

But Bruces rant echos my feelings exactly.  People here complain
of lack of directed advertising from IBM for the AS/400, but
forget that IBM sells to a heterogenous marketplace.  Sure, the
AS/400 is a damn fine system, but should it be pushed to all
potential customers?  The PC's, RS/6000's, Netfinity's, and 390's
are damn fine systems too, and they too have their fans.

Likewise, as Bruce points out, just like different hardware tools
have their specific uses, so too do different programming
languages have their places in the programming world.  Although I
work on improving the RPG language, I'm one of the first to point
out that it's not for everything.  These days especially, it's
vitally important to learn new things and add new tools to your
toolbox.

Someone on this thread complained about Java performance.  But
the steady increases in hardware performance really have made
language performance less and less of an issue now.  Other
factors, like speed of development and ease of maintenance have,
to a very great extent, overtaken language performance as a
design issue.  To illustrate, consider that many of the biggest
and most successful web sites have been implemented using Perl,
a language not known for speedy run-time, but with a reputation
for speedy development.

To summarize, although we've always been in an ever-changing
profession, the rate of change seems to be steadily increasing.
Dealing with that change is vital for the continued success of
software developers.  And finally, sure, RPG will die out
sometime in the future, but so what?  It will only be because
people will be using something better!

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com


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