Re: Re: cost estimate for a GUI pilot

RPG will never "die", but our community doesn't produce enough tooling to
keep IBM i businesses competitive. Obviously there are businesses that
have used RPG to get to the web successfully (I've done this a number of
times, Brad has done it even more), so I am not saying RPG can't do it.

From what I hear, that customer service app I wrote for the company we used

to work for is STILL up and running and in use. That didn't even use any
toolkits, just basic API wrappers. :)

I also have a few other customers that have been running apps using RPG
(both CGIDEV2 or our eRPG SDK) for years with much delight. I still work
with a few and update/add more features all the time to their
applications. Would I like to go back and rework some of them? Sure, but
you'll have that with any technology.

I would argue that the scope of programmers that you see the imbalance in
is only a small portion of the community. There are those like us on these
lists/forums and the regulars at COMMON, etc that I believe your statement
of imbalance represents.

But, there is a much larger scope of those that are happy where they are
and what they are doing. I've worked with hundreds of them over the years
and while they don't mind a little nudge (ie, towards ILE, or some simply
web apps or applications that consume web service data) they don't want a
huge push where their toolset needs to be reworked.

You don't just go into a shop and force a new technology on them when
they've got hundreds of thousands of lines of code in place already that
have been working great for years, and no one is complaining. To me,
that's like taking a palate jack into a hair salon and saying "put down
those scissors and curling irons and use this!" (well, not really, but
that's all I could think of... lol)

Brad
www.bvstools.com