Product Enhancement by Voting? -- MIDRANGE-L

...> almost everything excised

"Smart people are just that-smart and by definition they are in the
minority."

Are you saying that "smart" is bad?  Or are you saying that minorities don't
matter?  What would you have us do with this tiny minority of highly
annoying smart people?  It might be best to move on to the point that I was
trying to make.

Please allow me to quote from '"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Adventures of a Curious Character' by Richard P. Feynman.  The following
quotations are from the chapter titled, "Judging Books by Their Covers".  In
this chapter, Feynman is describing his experience with the California State
Curriculum Commission in the early 1960s.  The State Curriculum Commission
selected the all the schoolbooks used by all of the kids in all of the
public schools in California.  At that time, each committee member would
pass books around to a group of teachers or others in the public.  Each of
these reviewers would rate the book and send their ratings to the committee
members who averaged the results.  When the committee met, they would
combine their averages to rank the books.  Books with the highest ranking
were selected.  Feynman disagreed with this practice.  He read each book
himself, created his own impression, and didn't give the books to any
reviewers.  When he attended the meetings, he was the only one that had read
the book and had any real facts about it.

"This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by
looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who
looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was
permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the
length of the Emperor of China's nose?  To find our, you go all over the
country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's
nose is, and you average it.  And that would be very "accurate" because you
averaged so many people.  But it's no way to find anything out; when you
have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at
it, you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging."

Feynman then describes a problem with a science book that he calls the
"energy-makes-it-go" book.  The book says something that doesn't mean
anything and he uses it as an example of how bad the books are and how the
process is flawed because it selects books that contain things that look
impressive but are not helpful.  [Other students of Feynman should kick in
here if they disagree with the wording in this paragraph]

Feynman resigned from the State Curriculum Commission because he, "... was
exhausted from reading all the math books, and discouraged from its all
being a wasted effort, I couldn't face another year of that, and had to
resign.  Sometime later I head that energy-makes-it-go book was going to be
recommended to the Board of Education, so I made one last effort.  At each
meeting of the commission the public was allowed to make comments, so I got
up and said why I thought the book was bad.  The man who replaced me on the
commission said, "That book was approved by sixty-five engineers at the
Such-and-such Aircraft Company!"  I didn't doubt that the company had some
pretty good engineers, but to take sixty-five engineers is to take a wide
range of ability -- and to necessarily include some pretty poor guys!  It
was once again the problem of averaging the length of the emperor's nose, or
the ratings on a book with nothing between the covers.  It would have been
far better to have the company decide who their better engineers were, and
to have them look at the book.  I couldn't claim that I was smarter than
sixty-five other guys -- but the average of sixty-five other guys,
certainly!"

Democracy is not the way to find anything out.

It is my opinion that language features should be selected by a small group
of people thinking carefully about the problem, not by a large group of
people thinking carelessly about it.

I assert that there should be two categories of new features: features
needed today by the general programming population and stuff needed to take
the product into the future.  [Or, in the case of Don's multidimensional
arrays, into the brave new world of the 1950's :)]  Both the present and
future are critical.  It is perilous to ignore either one.

We cannot leave the decisions to the language writers because, in almost
every case, they have a lot of experience creating a compiler but very
little experience using the target language to solve business problems.
This isn't an insult to their intelligence or yours.  Those are different
skill sets.

Suppose that multi-dimensional arrays are added to RPG.  It would be
unthinkable to change the way that current programs were coded.  Suppose
that support were added for specifying file names or record format names in
a character variable.  Existing code and coding techniques would have to
continue to work.  Same with file handles and a couple dozen other things.

RPG shouldn't be forced to accommodate every feature found in every computer
language.  In the AS/400 world, the only compiler that many people have
access to is RPG so they want things from Cobol and PL/I and C added to RPG.
In my opinion, that would be wrong.  Your observations about learning curve
and stability are valid but I have a question.

Booth, is it possible that you are a little too comfortable?  I am
struggling to learn Java and HTML and CGI and XML and to stay in touch with
what little C that I know.  The e-commerce revolution is sweeping our
industry.  Technical obsolescence is a big risk for me and perhaps for
others closely connected to the AS/400.

If your vote keeps RPG from expanding to meet new challenges does that
accelerate the demise of the 400?  In my previous job, the company decided
to create a client-server version of the product and to operate on NT and
Unix.  The company's product had been AS/400-based so their technical group
was not familiar with NT or Unix.  When they brought in the new technical
people, the NT and Unix people looked down their noses at the AS/400 as an
antique architecture.  That attitude is a problem because they didn't know
AS/400, there weren't enough AS/400 gurus around to help with the
development and integration, the attitude offended the IBM people and this
reduced collaboration (IBM was a little too comfortable and had its own
baggage but that is another story), so the best work went into NT and Unix
and the new applications don't work quite as well on the AS/400 as they do
on the other platforms.  When companies currently on AS/400 choose to
implement client server technologies, they usually hire new people from that
labor pool.

It is up to us - to you and me - to keep the platform and ourselves vibrant
and tied to the future.  Adding future-oriented features to RPG is part of
that effort.

I am certain that I'm not smart enough to make all the decisions but I don't
want IBM to make decisions for the future of a language based mostly on
casual voting.

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

+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---