RE: Recommendations for a newcomer?

RPG and COBOL are dead. No new development in these languages is being done. Others on this list may disagree: I ask them to provide concrete examples of development being done beyond a few modules in either language. That being said, there are millions upon millions of lines of code in both languages that will need maintenance and improvement for the next century or so.

The problem is that RPG and COBOL are just not tool-able to the extent others are.

If you want to be close to the metal, learn C. If you want to write very high-level stuff using standard libraries and open source libraries, learn Java. If you want to write code for PC that runs on Microsoft PC's learn Visual Basic or C#. If you want to write mobile apps, learn Java or Objective-C.

CL is easy and doesn't take long to learn. It is has limited applicability besides IBMi system operations. If you want to be an IBMi systems operator or systems administrator, learn CL.

Notice that nowhere do I mention C++. I think it is dead, too.

There are other languages that have niche markets; python and php, for instance.

If you're going to do anything with user interfaces, learn html, xml, javascript, CSS and xmlTransform .

There's no single language you can learn that is going to carry your career. You're have to learn to learn new stuff every day.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Clay B Carley
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 10:06 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Recommendations for a newcomer?

Being new to midrange systems, I'm attempting to pick up skills that
will be useful for me in the future, in hopes to get a job working with
them. Reading articles that say things like COBOL is uncool, and RPG is
worse isn't really giving me hope for a future working with a midrange
system though.

Is it going to be worth my time to learn things like CL, COBOL, and RPG
now? Or are they fading away? It would be pretty sad to finally become
proficient with these languages, only to find out that they are dead and
replaced with <blah> instead.

What would you recommend a newcomer focus on (aside from system operations)?

Reading Rob's message from last week regarding "20 years of experience,
versus one year of experience repeated 20 times" looks like a pretty
good starting place I suppose. I'm really trying to look at where we're
going to be in the years to come, not necessarily tomorrow.

Thanks for any suggestions,
Clay Carley