Buck,
All valid points. My definition of a development environment includes the
debugging and other utilities included with Rational. I agree that an ant
like feature and the build deploy features would be nice, but clearly IBM
and the other tool vendors have chosen to put those into other products,
Rational Jazz and such.
An interesting project would be to see if we could build an ant environment
that would work for IBM i projects. True the source would move to the IFS
but big whoop there, I'll bet with some thought we could do it.
A topic of conversation for "Ask the Experts" night at the COMMON Annual
Meeting next week.
--
Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects
-----Original Message-----
From: Midrange-NonTech [mailto:midrange-nontech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Buck Calabro
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 10:26 AM
To: midrange-nontech@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: SEU versus vi and Vim
On 4/30/2014 10:22 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:
Regardless of the positive/negatives of VI, VIM, and/or SEU, they are
all still text editors in the end. EMACs come very close to Eclipse
(I use it on my Linux boxes) but it's still not a true development
environment. It is however free whereas Rational is not, nor should it
be.
I'm not sure what the point of disagreement is. Maybe it's the definition
of 'development environment'. What is the difference between 'development'
vs 'editor' in the midrange space? Especially when the de facto bar is set
at PDM options 2, 14 and very occasionally, 15? I've been a user of RDi for
decades, but RDi doesn't offer a single tool beyond Click to edit (PDM 2)
and Ctrl-Shift-C (PDM 14) to help me assemble a midrange application.
There's no build tool, no make, no ant, nothing at all that tracks the
constituent parts of an app that I've changed and does a semi-automated
build/deploy for me. *I* the programmer have to remember every single piece
and *I* the programmer have to make sure to compile those pieces in the
proper order and *I* the programmer have to remember to assemble (CRTSRVPGM,
ADDBNDDIRE, binder language exports, etc) those pieces into working
software.
The mention of Eclipse is, in my opinion, a red herring. On Windows or
Linux, I can use Eclipse to refactor a C or Java program. No such ability
exists for us midrangers. On other platforms I can use make to detect that
the prototypes have changed and automatically recompile the affected modules
and automatically rebind them into an executable. No such ability exists
for us midrangers.
Oh, sure there are commercial SCM solutions but the point is that for the
type of applications that we tend to develop on the midrange, make would
work quite nicely. Just as it does for many many projects on Windows and
Linux. 5799-PTL provides gmake, but it isn't i-aware. It can't tell that
I've changed a line in a source member, which means it has little utility in
my workaday life.
So, to close the circle, I don't think we midrangers ever had a development
environment. RDi is a far better editor than SEU, and that's plenty good
enough for me. The fact that I can use filters that will ultimately
correspond to a given application is also nice, kind of like a super PDM.
But RDi is no development environment. It certainly does not provide the
RPG programmer with the same tooling that Eclipse provides a C or Java
programmer on Linux.
Programmers love to debate editors. This one likes EMACS, that one likes
VIM and there's always some joker who swears he can maintain Firefox with
grep and sed. Midrangers for the most part never experienced different
editors, and similarly, have never experienced even the minimalist
'development environment' the lowliest Linux machine offers out of the box.
So we have nothing to compare with, and that's too bad, because if we did,
we'd probably realise that editing isn't worth diddly if we can't assemble
the constituents into a properly working application.
Our limited application assembly tool set is crippling our design choices.
That's one man's opinion and worth every penny you paid for it. But I think
everyone will agree that there's more to being a programmer than editing
source.
--buck
-----Original Message-----
From: Midrange-NonTech [mailto:midrange-nontech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of John Yeung
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 8:54 AM
To: Non-Technical Discussion about the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: SEU versus vi and Vim (was: Is COBOL dead?)
On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Jim Oberholtzer
<midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
a large amount of the development on AIX is in COBOL. Up until IBM
provided them with Rational, they did not even have a true
development environment on the UNIX side. (VI and VIM are not
development environments but rather little brothers to SEU)
I'll grant you that vi is nowhere near Eclipse when it comes to
providing a "development environment". But when it comes to
***editing code***, vi is actually much more capable than SEU, and Vim is
even beyond that.
There is a difficult learning curve with vi, including configuration.
If you want to knock it for anything, knock it for that. I fully
admit it's a pretty serious knock. Also, SEU has extensive built-in
support for certain programming languages that vi doesn't, but that is
because the two editors were developed on vastly different platforms.
If you want to program in any of the numerous languages that are
available for (and typically included with) Unix and Unix-like
platforms, vi is far superior to SEU. Even if there were a Linux
version of SEU for programming in bash, C, Perl, Python, Lisp, PHP,
and on and on ad nauseum, vi would win hands down.
(The only argument you would ever get from Unix/Linux users in an SEU
vs. vi debate is "why isn't Emacs in the conversation, because it
wipes the floor with both of them". Emacs is actually capable enough
that it potentially
*does* rival Eclipse as a development environment.
But in some ways it's even harder to learn than vi, so in practice
people only master at most one of vi or Emacs.)
John
--
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