Re: what was the single mgmt decision made in mid-1990s that slowed the evolution of ILE/RPG?

Hi John

I send this privately, as it isn't worth cluttering the list with it. I present some thoughts for your consideration.

Steve has long been one to proclaim gloom and doom about the i - sometimes he makes a good point, but usually he seems grossly uninformed. As an example, consider the comments in this thread - then look at Jon Paris - he was the lead on the RPG development team at around the time Steve is talking about. I'll listen to Jon first anytime.

Maybe Steve is an Old Testament prophet in our midst. But so far he has not passed their test - always right! Of course, none of us do, but in my time here, he's usually really far off the mark - but loud!

Somewhere along here, Stuart Milligan was mentioned. I've met him - seems well-informed and certainly has a great cross-reference tool product line with associated application. I just don't know how much that he says in the attribution is spin or fact.

So it's take what you like and leave the rest - same for what I've said here.

Oh, if you can, it might be a great introduction to things if you came to the COMMON annual meeting in Reno this year - check it out at www.common.org - COMMON is the national user group - I think there's one for the z - Dan Kimmel, another of our developers, went to that last year and came back with lots of good information. I'll be there with our company and would love to meet you and have a calorie-free beverage somewhere ;-) The company is RJS Software Systems - and our site is www.rjssoftware.com if you want to get a little hint of what we are up to.

Regards
Vern

McKown, John wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Richter
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2009 4:35 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: what was the single mgmt decision made in mid-1990s that slowed the evolution of ILE/RPG?

<snip>

ILE has the feel of an unfinished product. The signature violations
the many avoid by hardcoding the signature. The varying data type in
RPG that is not supported in COBOL and CL. The pre compiler is
undocumented. esp in terms of how to create debugger view. The
associated space of a program APIs have a parameter for named
associated spaces. Only problem is the API rejects all names. SQL
procedures are barely functional within ILE. The integration of SQL
within a running ILE program could be easily improved. Result sets as
an ILE data type, log sql stmts to the joblog, send an escape message
when an sql stmt fails.

And the above is the only real thing that concerns me about the "i". It
is an excellent platform, but you are basically "stuck" doing things the
way the IBM has designed it. If IBM "falls short" in any way, there is
not way, that I have found at least, for the users to "band together"
and "fix" the problem. In today's world, the same could be said of z/OS
in many ways. But before IBM went "object code only" (especially
OS/360), the users could look at and "fix" IBM problems. Of course, this
lead to some problems of its own due to incompatibilities and difficulty
in upgrading. <sigh> There is no "perfect" system.

--
John McKown Systems Engineer IV
IT

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