Re: Microsoft goes after the iSeries

I've been reading the back and forth for a bit, and I'm emotionally as
embroiled as anybody.  I'm an RPG guy since 1978, and I'm basically
green screen.  I never really understood the whole embroglio over
Microsoft vs iSeries because my customers could never, ever swap out
an iSeries for any Windows machine due to the volume of data (telco
billing=millions of records per month.)  Indeed, I view(ed) tighter
integration with MS to be a good thing.  Who doesn't like the idea of
being able to click a widget on a green screen and have an Excel graph
pop up showing the past bill information.

But the idea that Microsoft is now actively trying to replace the
iSeries with Microsoft solutions has made me reconsider my opinion.

Phillip Hinojosa said:

> RPG developers have lots of choices
> now....that's a good thing.

I'll preface my remarks with this thought.  You're clearly talking
about the front end; the UI.  A PC.  AVR.NET does not run under
OS/400, so it is useless for back end programming, which happens to
make up the bulk of what us traditional RPG programmers do.

Regarding the front end, we've had lots of choices for a while -
years, in fact, including the previous incarnations of AVR from ASNA.
So I guess you're just saying that choice is good?

> I hope you get to read the Computerworld article
> because it really represents what a real-world
> ASNA customer is like. (AVR.NET on
> iSeries/i5).

I read the article word for word, and I'm a bit at a loss to see much
more than a recycled press release about how programmers can use their
familiar RPG.  This is marketing hype.  No Windows language is like
iSeries RPG, because Windows is not like OS/400.  Let me clarify that
a bit.  Windows event programming (buttons, drag & drop and so on) is
completely unknown to an RPG programmer who uses traditional subfiles.
While the syntax of AVR may well have all our familiar columns, what
to _do_ with those columns remains unexplored territory.

My point (I do have one  :-)) is that when I did Windows programming
(VB, VC, Visual RPG, Delphi) I didn't find the syntax of the language
to be particularly difficult - it's just displaying panels, after all.
No rocket science there.  The learning curve is in figuring out
Windows, and how to make the thing behave like Windows users expect it
to behave.  Summing up, it isn't the columns that make RPG
programmer-productive, it's the interaction with OS/400.  All of that
is gone in a Windows environment.

Regards,
  --buck