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> From: Steve Richter > > I am using Visual Basic more and more in my work. I highly > recommend it to > AS400 pgmrs to broaden their skills and marketability. But definitely, > buyer beware. Here is a story of a bug and microsoft's response to it. The problem, IMO, with Microsoft's language strategy is that it is based on market share rather than application development capability. I'm not going to get into a debate here, because it's my opinion and your mileage may vary, but there seems to be a fundamental difference between RPG and whatever the language du jour at Microsoft is. Now, it may be because RPG was written at a different time in the computer industry, when turf wars were won by having a better product, rather than by creating a captive market. Or maybe my vision is clouded by the fact that I grew up in that time, kind of like the fact that the bands I grew up with were the last ones to create real music, and everything else is derivative drivel <grin>. In any event, there is a practical difference to all of this, at least so far. Until recently, your RPG skills could keep you in reasonable employment. But whatever Microsoft skills you have are very quickly lost, because Microsoft's main road to viability is to promote yet another new standard every seemingly every other month. How many languages and operating systems has Microsoft abandoned in the last few years? You've got nearly every version of Windows, as well as Java, J++ and VB. Whereas my S/38 and AS/400 skills both in the operating system and in RPG still are viable in today's market. Adjusted for economic pressures, I think the RPG market has held quite well. There are lots of VB jobs out there, but not for long, unless you know VB.Net. How many J++ programming jobs are there? (More for RPG, I can guarantee you that much.) That is changing to be sure. The "evolution" of RPG into a sort of Java-like language with native I/O support is a bit disconcerting, but at the same time it's made programming very much more interesting than it used to be. And I'm not upset, because IBM still supports the old RPG code and compiler, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Whereas you can see from Steve's post that Microsoft is all but abandoning the VB platform for the "new and improved VB.Net" because it's all about the marketshare. VB.Net forces people to use .Net, and and .Net is simply Microsoft's way of tying you to their proprietary technology so that they don't have to worry about pesky things like quality or service. Joe
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