RE: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

Sillyness!!

Two exclamation points!!  Wow!!  I'm finally starting to really enjoy
the extreme responses to such emotional topics!!

I should be more clear.  It can be more difficult to support entry-level
developers in a small shop.  I was talking about training folks straight
out of college.  No business experience.  No real world analysis.  An
experienced developer brings a lot more to the table -- beyond mere
knowledge of the programming language.  Often small shops don't gear up
to hire entry-level because they don't have the overhead to monitor the
learning curve, which goes way beyond learning the language.

And, quite frankly, I don't think the training conveniences of ILE over
RPG III are quite so profound!!

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Larry Bolhuis
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 11:00 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

I started my career at a place that grew their own RPG programmers.
They hired kids straight out of college, screened them with a logic
test, and gave them a couple weeks on the ATS training tapes.  Of

course

they had a staff of 20-40 seasoned veterans with one to three years
experience.  Also it was back in the days of the System 38 and the
fill-in-the-blanks programming of RPG III.

You probably can't really do this in a shop with one or two iSeries
programmers.  I suppose that's the point though. <snip>

This is sillyness!!  If your shop is willing to or has already moved to 
the Modern RPG ILE language and it's free form syntax you're golden. 
Programmers fresh out of college will eat this up!  I graduated 25 years

ago knowing LISP, PASCAL, COBOL, BASIC and FORTRAN. I learned RPG II in 
a couple weeks. RPG II is Nothing and I repeat NOTHING like today's RPG 
ILE. Today's RPG ILE is so close to the BASIC and FORTRAN and PASCAL 
that I knew it's amazing.

Here's the rub, If you stay in RPG/400 land then YES it will be harder 
to find and train programmers, especially programmers who are productive

and want to hang around. Move to ILE though and much of that problem 
just goes away. Use a modern language on a modern machine!

 - L