RE: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

From: Mark Phippard

Hire well-rounded people that have demonstrated an eagerness to learn and
train them yourselves.  You will probably get the best programmers you
have ever had.  RPG is a very easy language to learn, and OS/400 is
probably the easiest OS to program for because it does so much for you.
Allow the programmer to use WDSC and the latest RPG coding techniques and
it should not be terribly hard for someone with a background in other
languages to learn RPG.  You might even benefit from their knowledge of
things like SQL and code separation from using the languages they know.

This is a huge point.  RPG is dead-bang easy to learn.  If you can handle
Java or C++, you can certainly learn RPG.  The only foreign concept is ISAM
database access.  (And lest you think ISAM is some sort of RPG-only
aberration, this is the same technique that basically built the PC
application world, with tools like dBase and FoxPro.)  I think the only
language easier than RPG is BASIC, especially the point-and-click varieties.

And Logo <g>.

Just don't force them to learn RPG II/III and SEU.

Yup... get them into WDSC right off the bat, and they'll just learn RPG as
one of their tools.

Joe