Re: i5/OS

Walden H. Leverich wrote:

If we're saying that there are 7 places teaching i5 as evidence that
it's not dead then we've got a serious problem.

I don't know that the number of universities teaching RPG has ever been a good measure of the platform. All that college enrollment measures is the number of students who think they will make money in a given course. Back when I started, CS was not seen as a money making industry, and it was hard to find *any* CS courses, even at premiere technical universities like IIT.

Courses follow students, students follow the easy money. Java, .NET, games, each of these are seen as lucrative and fun. I don't know of a single CS student who goes into it thinking they'll be programming accounts receivable code. That's why you'll see college curricula wax and wane with the broad popularity of the subject.

Now, I don't argue that having fewer college courses might make it more difficult to sell RPG as a strategic language for new development. But the attrition of programmers and the still-huge base of code means that RPG skills will become more, rather than less, valuable in the coming years. The price for RPG programmers will rise and there will be a corresponding rise in students wanting to program in it, probably over the next four or five years. However, if that swell doesn't in turn result in a new base of code, then it might well be one of the last of such cycles.

Joe