Re: COMMON rates (was RE: Congrads John Earl!) -- MIDRANGE-L

rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I think you missed part of the sentence "instead of learning more about RPG". Perhaps they are encouraging their people to learn subprocedures, activation groups, etc. However they fear that if a conflict between one of these and a java class comes up, then the person may take the java class.

I understand your point.

Once again, I feel that this is an issue that would be better dealt with a firm directive, maybe even a review of the layout, and then give the person the flexibility to fill in the blanks.

Rob Berendt

I agree. If someone wants to justify a trip to COMMON, the request probably should include a concrete set of goals to satisfy management. For example, education on specific things, like ILE.

But still, it's sad that a manager would deny an employee a trip to COMMON just because he may be exposed to Java, or some other non-RPG technology.

In response to Ken who said "Hence, the desire, and need to join a group of people, who can really push one type of technology to the limit.": I think it's noble that people want to use RPG for everything. But just how far can certain technologies like RPG be pushed? I've argued before that there's a difference between "It's possible to do something using some tool" and "It's a good idea to do it using that tool". Personally, I think some people are pushing RPG too far into areas better dealt with using other tools. Yes, RPG is good for many things, but not for everything.

I don't mean to denigrate RPG or promote certain other tools, but here's an example in the world of CGI. Many RPG CGI programmers use the template technique, where the source to the HTML code is kept in separate source members. Just to illustrate my point, here's how you might code the template technique in another language, Python.

First, here's a small sample HTML template:
--------------------------------------
<html>
<title>%(title)s</title>
<body>
<h1>%(title)s</h1>
%(body)s
</body>
</html>
--------------------------------------

Now, here's the Python code to read that template file, substitute in some replacement values, and write out the HTML:

--------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/env python

# Read template file
tf = file('template.text')
template = tf.read()
tf.close()

# Set up the replacement variables
title = 'This is the title'
body = '<p>This is the body</p>'

# Write out the web page
print template % vars()
--------------------------------------

Easy, huh? (To keep this note short, I won't post the corresponding RPG code. But RPG CGI programmers know what it looks like.) OK, Python happens to be an especially easy language to program in. And like I said, I don't mean to promote it in particular or denigrate RPG. This example is just to illustrate that there can be distinct benefits in looking to other technologies for certain things.

Cheers! Hans