Re: With the dropping of a few features from IBM i are there vendor software concerns?

On Sep 23, 2024, at 8:50 PM, x y <xy6581@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm moderately handy with mechanical and electronic things. I have a
drawer filled with screwdrivers of differing shapes and sizes because some
screwdrivers work better on a given task than other screwdrivers. They're
tools.

Utilities are tools too and I bristle when I hear suggestions that IBM
proposes to discontinue SEU. It's a tool and you never should throw a tool
away (which is why I have a source file with hundreds of weird little
programs going back more than 30 years, and I cringe when I look at some of
that code). *And SEU is the most stable tool I've used in 50 years of
midrange coding.*

I"ve been a fan of PC-based text editors since the days of CoDe and RDi is
the first program I start every day. But RDi, as good as it is (and I
greatly appreciate its goodness), ain't the right tool for every job. Even
with a gigabit internet connection to a fast machine 1100 miles away, it's
slow. Live parsing is slow. SQL syntax checking, IIRC, requires a live
host. I get the dialing donut for no apparent reason. And apparently RDi
is not everybody's favorite--it has competitors, with VS Code being the
first among equals.

I can make SEU changes and submit a compile in nothing flat. Waiting for
RDi is unproductive and frustrating. And SDA--well, maybe it's me but IMO
it remains a highly productive tool for building *and modifying* displays
(recognizing DDS is going out of fashion with the cognoscenti). Yes, RDi
does a better job on printer files--no argument there.

I get why IBM chooses to discontinue sysytem utilities with deprecated
functionality or hardware incompatibilities. It's dead code and makes a
very big pile of technical debt. But for user tools? I don't get it.
Killing SEU and SDA is likely to drive users into the free arms of VS
Code--if they haven't signed up for RDi by now, even with IBM's extensive
promotions, taking away SEU isn't going to change anything except make
customers mad.

Perhaps a future OS release will break SEU/SDA and this is IBM's response
instead of reissuing a refreshed version of the product. IBM might not
have the developer headcount to work on it. The distribution mechanism
might be complicated but I don't see how. It may be another revenue
generation push with RDi (reread VS Code comments).

I am highly productive by combining internally-developed tools, SEU, SDA,
and RDi. Let's hope IBM is smart enough to recognize that productivity
exists in apps as modest and unassuming as a text editor.

On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 5:19 PM Justin Taylor <jtaylor.0ab@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Not that I know of. You can edit DDS menus, but if RDi has a way to
compile them I've never found it.

date: Mon, 23 Sep 2024 12:27:12 -0400
from: Jeff Crosby <jlcrosby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: With the dropping of a few features from IBM i are there
vendor software concerns?

RDi can be used for menus?

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