Re: [IBMiOSS] RPG easier/harder to use than other languages?

On 05.07.2017 21:26, Jack Woehr wrote:

*IBM i* is what it is and ain't what it ain't. Open Source transforms your
processes, but doesn't really change the platform.

Future apps may be written in Language X (C/C++? Go ? Perl?) + SQL, but *IBM
i* is not a hand-held mobile device, it's *z/OS*-lite, and nothing is going
to change that :)

Very true. And it has all of the things it needs and also RPG has most of the features it needs to write business solutions. Things like database access, fixed precision decimal numbers, date and time data types and functions, strings (char / varchar), .... and with ILE it has also polyglot functionality so you can tap into C/C++ modules.

For me ILE and RPG has a sane feature set which you can build on. Problem is that almost nobody builds stuff with it AND makes it available to others like in other programming communities.

IMHO we need better tooling support and better REST support as REST is the way to integrate into other systems, REST and message queuing system (like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ). This is where a native STOMP client would be great as most message queuing systems understand STOMP. Both things (REST framework and STOMP client) can be developed by the community. We have all the tools at hand. We just need to do it.

My 2 cents.

Mihael