Real ILE" ( tangent from RPGIII compiler vs. Visual Basic) -- MIDRANGE-L

Alan,

I think you are right.  The engineering concepts must be understood
first.
Although it seems like thinking style comes into play here as well.
It seems paradoxical to me that you find abstraction a solution to short
term memory limitation.  In order to accomplish that abstraction, you
have to break your problem down to all these different levels, and still
somehow keep track of how all these pieces at all these different levels
fit together.  I got kind of dizzy just reading through the example you
provided.  I'm sure I'll get it after three or five reads, but it
doesn't come naturally to me.

That's what the fellows who wrote the Programmer's Stone were getting
at.  You have a "mapper" thinking style.  You are presented with a
problem, and your mind finds it as simple as water flowing down a hill
to map the path to all the pieces needed to resolve the problem, and the
principles at deeper levels of abstraction which form the context for
that problem.  Packer minds don't flow that way.  They are like two
dimensional rats in a maze who can't see the cheese on the other side of
the wall and climb over. 

The authors seem to imply that people are either one or the other, and
they may be right, but I think those of us who find ourselves in the
packer camp might do well to try to grasp a new way of thinking.
Sometimes looking at programming is like looking at that weird optical
illusion where a profile of an old hag turns into the profile of a young
woman if you view it another way.    

On the other hand, I get the impression that information technology is
so deeply imbedded in every business process these days that there will
be room for the packer types to remain gainfully employed handling tasks
under the supervision of those with a broader vision.  We just won't
earn as much. 

Greg 

-----Original Message-----
message: 6
date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:38:25 -0700
from: Alan Campin <Alan.Campin@xxxxxxx>
subject: "Real ILE" ( tangent from RPGIII compiler vs. Visual Basic)

>> The solution? Smart people should make more babies. But then you 
>> wouldn't have time to do all that programming, would you ? Just my 
>> two cents. Greg Fleming

Boy, don't I try but resistance is incredible. 

I'm like you Greg. I have no formal training in programming. Just
learned on my own. My only advantage (disadvantage) was that I have a
bad short term memory and I cannot keep twenty things in my head at the
same time so I had to develop the concepts of structured programming in
order to keep track of what I was doing. In other words, I had to learn
to do functional decomposition to keep track of things. Break things
down into small pieces. Have each piece do one thing. When ILE and RPG
IV came along, it was just natural. The first time I started to play
with RPG IV and procedures, I really thought I had died and gone to
heaven. Finally a real programming environment where I can do real
software engineering.