Hello,
Common opinion. Go ask people that never touched a System i about these
programming languages.
Ask CIOs of non-System i companies what they think about RPG and COBOL.
That's why I said you should never ever mention these names when trying
to sell the System i to new customers.
But... isn't this also true of anything System i related? If they've
heard of the platform at all, that is? It's not just RPG or COBOL, is
it? The whole platform is legacy in the minds of these people you're
referring to.
They may not consider Java to be legacy, but they're also not expecting
you to run Java on the System i, they're expecting you to run it on
Windows or Linux.
As your User-Agent: Header tells me, you're already running Windows XP.
So the only thing you'd have to do to start developing in C# would be to
download Visual Studio Express
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/). And now you can program in
.NET/C#.
... but, again, this seems to be an argument for why the System i is
legacy, not an argument for why RPG is legacy.
Whether you are or aren't using RPG, you're not going to be running
i5/OS on your desktop PC, are you? If anything you can't download and
run on your desktop is legacy, then an awful lot of things are legacy,
including the entirety of the System i.
Let's also assume you're currently not working for a company that
already has a System i. Now you've heard much good about the System i,
and want to consider it as a new platform for your internal environment.
You can't even learn RPG without access to a System i.
Okay. What are these wonderful things you've heard about the System i?
Surely not "it runs Java better than Windows" or "it runs C# better
than windows"?!?!
These great things you've heard about the system are about how well you
can run your business on the system. Why is the System i better for
business logic? Because RPG is a better language for business logic.
It's also wonderful because some really great business applications
exist for the System i -- and those applications are almost always
written in RPG.
If you're going to run Java or .NET, you don't need the System i -- it
actually runs BETTER on other systems.
You don't pick a platform because "it's just like everything else". You
pick a platform because it has ADVANTAGES over another platform. Saying
that anything that's not available elsewhere is legacy doesn't make
sense to me.
Imagine you were in the restaurant business... would you stop selling
food that doesn't taste exactly like the competitors food? After all,
if all food tastes the same, it'd be easier to find chefs who can cook
it, right? It'd be easier to find customers, because it wouldn't matter
to the customers which restaurant they went to... the food everywhere
tastes the same. Right? Does that sound like a good idea to you?
This is probably also one of the reasons why I've never seen students
that want to learn RPG (but many of them that were learning C#).
I've seen several studies where they've asked students why they don't
learn RPG. The overwhemingly #1 answer, at over 80% in both surveys I
read: "because there are no jobs in it."
And when looking at both the major swiss job markets (www.jobscout24.ch,
www.monster.ch), there are 4 RPG jobs available in total right now.
Compared to a total of 150 C# jobs.
Agreed. There are no jobs in RPG. However, how many of those C# jobs
were System i jobs? I bet it was less than 4. In fact, I'll bet it's
less than 1.
There are nearly 1000 times as many PCs in use in business today than
there are System i machines. Consequently, there are more jobs, and
more students studying it. Furthermore, the vast majority of System i
stuff out there is maintaining the status quo. When people decide to
upgrade their software, they're often leaving the platform.
These are the things we should be working to change. We should endeavor
to make the System i a platform that people don't want to leave. We
should endeavor to make it a platform that people want to use.
And to do that, we have to concentrate on the system's strengths! We
need to upgrade all of the existing apps and get them out of the 5250
environment. We need to show the advantages of the integrated database,
and integrated error handling, etc.
How do we take advantage of these strengths? RPG.
midrange.com
