Please no logic cycle. How many devs born after 1970 have a good understanding of it?
-----Original Message-----
From: John Yeung [mailto:gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2016 4:25 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Development Standards
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 2:19 PM, James H. H. Lampert <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If you're writing an RPG program that needs (1) to process every
record in a file, or (2) needs an event loop, let it take a ride on The Cycle.
I can get behind that. The cycle is kind of controversial; but to me, using it where applicable is one way to play to RPG's inherent strengths.
Use the language that is (of those available) the best suited for the
program (or module) to be written, and use its strengths.
First, let me say I noticed and appreciated the qualifiers that were included there. You normally just see "use the best tool for the job"
(or its even worse brother, "use the right tool for the job", as if every job has exactly one right tool). I mean, it sounds nice, and yeah, if you've literally got a hammer and a screwdriver and some nails and some screws, it's pretty clear how you would apply this advice.
But programming languages are very complex tools indeed, and real-world problems are all kinds of crazy shapes and sizes, and they interact with each other, sometimes in unpredictable ways. It's hard to measure languages against each other definitively enough to come up with "best", even for fairly isolated problems. And then you have to factor in who is wielding those tools. And there is a certain value to only having a very small number of programming languages in use, even if you have many available to you. Whether this outweighs the advantages of having a richer toolset is hard to say.
I don't think I could ever begrudge an IBM i shop for using RPG as its official "language for everything" even if I personally don't consider it the best language for a large chunk of that shop's problems.
John Y.
midrange.com
