Wow, Buck. That was quite eye-opening for me. I was the one who
originally introduced Eclipse into the conversion, but I didn't intend
it to be a red herring. I really had the notion (being limited to
SEU/PDM at my workplace) that the very least RDi would do is
"everything that C and Java programmers expect from Eclipse"
***PLUS*** further i-specific things.
I was careful to say Eclipse specifically to avoid making direct
comparisons to or assertions about RDi, having never used it. I think
a lot of the disparaging things that are said about vi come from lack
of having used it enough to make a fair assessment; I tried not to
make the same mistake with RDi.
So, to close the circle, I don't think we midrangers ever had a
development environment. RDi is a far better editor than SEU [...]
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.
To me, this is kind of sad. I hope that long-time midrangers
understand that it's this kind of thing that makes outsiders or
newcomers react they way they do to IBMs pricing and technology. It's
*definitely* this kind of thing that makes it an uphill battle to
attract the best new talent to the platform.
Our limited application assembly tool set is crippling our design
choices.
I totally agree with this. I believe the tooling is actually one of
the things that is impeding adoption of ILE, just to take a basic
example. SEU/PDM really does not encourage ILE design. Even without
RDi, if there were nicer command-line tools included with the
development package, that would help. Well, it would help *me*
anyway. I cut my teeth on Unix in school, and at the time, all I had
was a text-based shell interface, and I was pretty happy with it.
Happier with that than I am with what I've got today on the i.
John
midrange.com
