Things evolve (re: Darwin), including languages (spoken as well as programming). I started in 1973 on a System/3 using RPG II and Cobol. Both evolved as the years went by (and I'm not including III and IV, yet). I, also, did a bit of Algol. Algol, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't exist any more.
As Hans pointed out, the conspiracy (cabal) theory is a little paranoid (my word choice, not Hans'). I suspect that programming language development is not much different from business systems design: We sit down and lay something out, meetings change the design, compromises are made for any number of reasons (cost, time, etc.), and we deliver. I've written programs that today I sure won't develop/write the same way (both because they were lousy in the first place and because of new capabilities). I don't doubt that somebody somewhere made a decision about the direction of RPG; these things don't "just happen." I don't doubt that M$ didn't go through the same process when designing .Net. What? You think it was born an adult without a gestation period?
Over the last 35 years a lot of programming languages have come and gone (re: Algol). But it seems that the big players in our sandbox (midrange and mainframe) continue to be RPG and Cobol. Both seem to have survived because of traction and because they improved (adapted to change). Maybe .Net will be around in 35 years, but, if it is, it won't be the same environment that it is today. And if it is around, it will be because some group in Redmond had a meeting (concocted a conspiracy) to drive it in a direction that they thought was best for M$. And then the question will be: What was the decision made in xxxx that sabotaged .Net? (I.e., took it down a road that *I thought* was stupid.)
Jerry C. Adams
IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
B&W Wholesale
office: 615-995-7024
email: jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Gibbs
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 7:43 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?
(I know I'm going to regret this)
Steve Richter wrote:
CL cant instantiate JAVA objects, or call a PHP method or even use
the RPG varying string.
Well, with the exception of the varying string point ... I respond: WHY SHOULD IT BE ABLE TO? CL is a job control language, not an application development language. It's intended to control the environment that a program operates in, not implement application logic. Using the same arguments you've made, one could say that unix shell script and windows batch files should be able to directly instantiate and interact with Java objects (without needing to run the java command).
RPG cant use an SQL result set.
Sure it can ... that's what RPG SQL is all about.
All of this is the responsibility of the run time framework, which on
the AS400 is/should be ILE.
Well, as Hans (welcome back, btw) has pointed out ... ILE isn't a runtime environment. OS/400 is the runtime environment.
david
(who's still confused why you stay on the platform you clearly hate)
midrange.com
