RE: DDS Support -- MIDRANGE-L

In the middle 80s, I ran into a guy named Bill Perkins.  Bill had a degree
in psychology from Penn State, I think.  He got a job as a programmer
working on the 38.  Although he was a very good programmer, he professed
that he didn't like to write programs or DDS.  So he built a data dictionary
and a simple application generator called DBWriter.  Bill spent a lot of
hours working on his tools and wrote code generation tools all the time.  I
frequently disagreed with the code that he created but I worked with Bill
for 3 years and I think that both Bill and his idea were genius.

In 1990, I went to work at JDEdwards.  At that time, they were shipping
release A4.3 and just releasing A5.1.  Before the entire development group
started to work on the new release, the "heavy tech" group (that was the
real name) made created the basis for the new release.  They would create
new pristine data libraries, copy source libraries for the current release
into source libraries for the new release, update some cross-release tools
like COPY, make all the database changes, and run several slimers.  A slimer
is a code modifying program that makes consistent changes to every program -
it treats DDS and RPG source as data.

I seem to remember that one of the A5 slimers fixed up some grotesque
features of the on-line help system.  In A6, one of the most memorable
slimers inserted the code necessary to handle double byte character in
character fields.  There were several slimers for each release.

After the source was slimed, we did a global compile then turned over the
compile listings and the new source library to the application developers.
They reviewed the compile listings for errors, get everything to compile,
then started to add the new application functionality that everyone had
agreed on.

I assume that all product development groups do something similar.  Is any
of this helpful?

Richard Jackson
mailto:richardjackson@richardjackson.net
www.richardjacksonltd.com
Voice: 1 (303) 808-8058
Fax:   1 (303) 663-4325

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com
[mailto:owner-midrange-l@midrange.com]On Behalf Of James W. Kilgore
Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2000 11:52 PM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: DDS Support


Richard,

I stand corrected.  My stint at compiler / interpreter writing is a bit
dated and the only tools you had are those you made yourself.  But
that's where the "Programs -are- data." originated from and my belief
that tools, any tools are worth the effort and more than return their
investment.

BTW, we love it when someone disagrees.  That's how we all learn.

Richard Jackson wrote:
>
> I'm new to this list so I hope that it is okay to disagree.  If not please
> tell me, I know how to be quiet too.
>
> Compiler writers use lots of tools and have for years.
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