Re: Just an observation -- MIDRANGE-L

"I don't know how to fix it. I have an idea, but it would take way more work than any one person could do. I just wonder whether it's worth it to try and create a medium where the discussion is entirely about business solutions. No threads about the name of the machine, or the impending death of RPG, or how ILE is better/worse than .Net, or indeed any sort of opinion-based discussion. Instead, just a pure, unadulterated focus on problems and solutions."

Joe,

Actually, I have had one of those "business solution" questions rattling around in my head for a few weeks but since I'd like to implement it in RPG and Java (and even some .Net) I am not sure where to post it. I respect the collective wisdom of this list and there are some folks where the title "rocket scientist" would be an understatement (IMHO). Since I am probably at the low end of knowledge spectrum when it comes to programming, I am a little reticent to post.

Not sure there would be enough traffic to warrant a separate list here on Midrange, but with the event of EGL and other GL's of that ilk, I expect that good design of business processes will become more important than the technical elegance of the solution.

If you think of a way to build such a forum, please post.

Pete Helgren

Joe Pluta wrote:

I remember back when I was starting out programming (back in the early 40s) and how I loved learning new languages. I started out with RPG, and then learned EDL (for the Series/1) and you couldn't stop me from messing around with the operating system (in the Series/1, the operating system was written in the primary HLL for the box; it was very cool). Next I started using assembly language and then Pascal and C. Note that I had been introduced to all these languages previously, along with standard CS 101 languages like Fortran and BASIC. But this was real programming, and I ate it up.

Back then, it wasn't about staking turf for a specific language or OS. In fact, most programmers didn't argue about such things. There were a few uber-nerds who argued about the superiority of the Z80 instruction set, or CP/M vs PC-DOS, but those were few and far between. Not that they weren't vehement; one of my favorite ongoing arguments was the raging debate between Pascal and C syntax. In Pascal, the equality operator is one character ("=") and the assignment operator is two (":="). As you know, in C and its derivatives, assignment is one character ("=") and equality is two ("=="). There would be screaming matches about this, with the C advocates actually doing statistical analysis of code to prove that there were more assignments than comparisons, and thus C was more productive.

Those people were considered... eccentric. They were the guys who not only actually owned their own Star Trek uniform, but considered it appropriate business attire. Meanwhile, the rest of us were just trying to figure out how to get the stupid cash register to answer the modem, or how to insert TTDs into a bisync data stream.

Nowadays, these sorts of arguments seem to be the norm. Rather than talking about solutions, discussion forums consistently devolve into arguments about syntax or the "rightness" of SQL vs. native or any of a million other issues that aren't really germane to solving business problems. Thankfully David manages to keep these lists the best in the Infoverse, but we're not immune.

I don't know how to fix it. I have an idea, but it would take way more work than any one person could do. I just wonder whether it's worth it to try and create a medium where the discussion is entirely about business solutions. No threads about the name of the machine, or the impending death of RPG, or how ILE is better/worse than .Net, or indeed any sort of opinion-based discussion. Instead, just a pure, unadulterated focus on problems and solutions.

Joe