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

I am still curious about decisions made regarding the evolution of
ILE. I think Windows has a clear advantage over Unix and the AS400
because the .NET framework provides a common denominator for all the
general purpose and domain specific languages used when programming
Windows. CL cant instantiate JAVA objects, or call a PHP method or
even use the RPG varying string. RPG cant use an SQL result set. All
of this is the responsibility of the run time framework, which on the
AS400 is/should be ILE.

Were there decisions made in the mid 1990s to slow and stop the
evolution of ILE?

On the front page of the Wall Street Journal today is a mention that
MSFT is increasing its investment in the MSFT Research division. The
next sentence reports that Google is asking to join an antitrust probe
of MSFT in Europe. If you cant beat em, sue them!

-Steve


On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 10:20 PM, Hans Boldt <hans@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There were a lot of decisions made in the early 1990's regarding RPG IV.
For the most part, almost all made sense at the time. The biggest
decision was over the question of fixed versus free format. The general
consensus was that the RPG community was not ready for a fully free-form
language AT THAT TIME. We were able to add limited free-form syntax in
the form of keywords and in the form of the Extended-Factor-2 calcs. The
latter barely made it into the language, though. If we had kept to the
original schedule, the language would likely have turned out very different!

Sure, there were some customers who wanted RPG IV to be much more. But
in general, many of those people moved on to other languages, such as Java.

Should RPG IV have been made more like Java or C#? Why bother. Those
languages have already been implemented!

Besides, in the years since RPG IV first came out, a lot has happened in
the computer world. You can't just compare RPG IV with Java and C#. The
real action is happening in the realm of the object-oriented scripting
languages, like Python and Ruby. With the speed of CPU's today, the fact
that these languages are interpreted is no longer the disadvantage it
once was. For numerous reasons, RPG IV simply has no hope in catching up
to the capabilities of these languages.

Cheers! Hans

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