Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch -- MIDRANGE-L

First, I did not imply anything - let alone that an IDE can prevent logicerrors. Which leads me to believe that your approach is simplyundisciplined.

If you are coding with the "edit, compile, run, fail, debug, edit, compile,run, fail, debug, edit, compile", this is not necessarily WRONG - just anundisciplined approach. An IDE provides you more tools to code with, verifybeing one, of course. It does not MAKE you a better coder, it provides meansfor you to be a more efficient coder. What happened to code walkthroughs?Did they go out of fashion because we got a faster server?

One of the things that WDSc does is to take most of the developmentenviroment OFF the System i. Unless we have a development server, chewingcycles for additional compiles because of undisciplined programmingtechniques can impact the business bottom line. WDSc can help that - byusing the PC as a development tool. What if an order is not taken, becausethe CPU cycles are re-compiling because you forgot something in your firstor second or third or.... pass? Why not code with more discipline, and getit right earlier?

I just think that we have it easy - the System i works well serving multipletasks - production AND development. And we got lazy in our coding efforts. Iused to teach a class called "Programming for performance andmaintainability". What I found was code that was hard to read by theprogrammer who WROTE it - and maintainability was improved by severalthings. One was better documentation (IN THE code) - WDSc helps with this,because you can see it clearly and can see MORE of it. Another was spendingtime understanding the code before diving in and edit/compile/edit/compile -with the ability to see more of the code, more source members, and toolslike verify, WDSc helps us be better programmers.

I guess the point is, just because you buy a new car does not make you abetter driver. But, some of the new inventions in the car will certainlyhelp you when you crash.

----- Original Message -----From: <AGlauser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

To: "Midrange Systems Technical Discussion" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 1:44 PM
Subject: RE: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

Trevor Perry wrote:

>If you are still coding in "edit, compile, run, fail, debug, edit,
compile,
run, fail, debug, edit, compile" mode, then it would seem you are using
WDSc
as you did with PDM - this is not a true Integrated Development
Environment.


Rob Berendt wrote on 15/12/2006 02:39:22 PM:

Some might argue that you use Verify, instead of Compile.  Granted the
first time you run Verify you will not be impressed, but it has to cache

bunch of stuff.  Repeated attempts to Verify should run faster.  Now,
we've got plenty of horsepower in our development lpar that I often just

compile instead of verify.


Verify can be nice if you don't want to use up processor time on your
System i.  It doesn't really do anything substantive to change the
development process Trevor mentions, however.  It just adds a couple of
steps:
"edit, compile, run, fail, debug, edit, compile, run, fail, debug, edit,
compile"  becomes "edit, verify, fix syntax errors, run, fail, debug ...".

Trevor seems to be implying that using an IDE can prevent logic errors,

which IMHO doesn't follow.