RE: [Re: RPGILE V4.3 Gotcha]

Chris wrote:

>> I could not agree you more.  Our company has been slow in moving to TRUE
>> RPGIV.  And even slower going to ILE.  We are way behind in our
enhancement
>> list.  It has been extremely hard to find good RPG programmers in our
area.
>> We are just starting to use the EVAL and I love it. 

Yea and the funny thing is that I am a top level ILE RPG developer and can't
find job anywhere in the West. Been looking for a month and a half and have
only had three phone interviews and nothing with any of them. One interview
in the Denver market. That's it but there doesn't appear to be anything in
the entire west, except in LA (My definition of hell). Every recruiter I
have talked with tells me the market has dried up. I have reluctantly been
looking at a job in North Carolina but I would hate to leave the West.

The few that I have found are all looking for RPG III and just looking for
someone to hack their lackey system, no development. One guy I talked wanted
a top level RPG ILE programmer. Turned out what he wanted this guy to do was
maintain this 20 years old system written in RPG II!

Has been a very frustrating process. What I don't know is whether this just
means the market has temporarily gone south or whether this thing is the
beginning of the end, at least for development on the AS/400.

I see a lot of signs that companies are not building new systems on the
AS/400 but instead developing them on NT or Unix and what I think is driving
this is that companies cannot find AS/400 developers who can work in ILE RPG
and any of the new paradigms so they are going to NT and UNIX. This is just
my perspective but virtually every major AS/400 vendor I see seems to
switching a majority of their development resources to NT and UNIX. This may
be not be true but it seems that way.    

Well, just my two cents. Be interested in your comments. Thanks.

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Bipes [mailto:ChrisB@cross-check.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 1999 9:47 AM
To: 'RPG400-L@midrange.com'
Subject: RE: [Re: RPGILE V4.3 Gotcha]


Hans,

I could not agree you more.  Our company has been slow in moving to TRUE
RPGIV.  And even slower going to ILE.  We are way behind in our enhancement
list.  It has been extremely hard to find good RPG programmers in our area.
We are just starting to use the EVAL and I love it.  As with coding with the
old op codes one must take into consideration the intermediate results.  I
think the rules are clear and strait forward.  Yes I would love the
"infinite precision with infinite speed" but that is not a reality.
Hopefully IBM can put a faster arithmetic processor into the Power PC chip
and give you the means to increase the decimal precision beyond 30.  But
what would be enough?  I try to never use the "H" spec for performance
reasons and use the extender where I feel it is necessary.

But then 15,2 x 5,3 / 15,2 might be the biggest Eval I use.  The
intermediate would be a 20,4.

Great job Hans and Co,

Christopher K. Bipes    mailto:ChrisB@Cross-Check.com
Sr. Programmer/Analyst  mailto:Chris_Bipes@Yahoo.com
CrossCheck, Inc.                http://www.cross-check.com
6119 State Farm Drive   Phone: 707 586-0551 x 1102
Rohnert Park CA  94928  Fax: 707 586-1884

*Note to Recruiters
I nor anyone that I know of is interested in any new and/or exciting
positions. Please do not contact me.





-----Original Message-----
From: boldt@ca.ibm.com [mailto:boldt@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 1999 6:13 AM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: [Re: RPGILE V4.3 Gotcha]




I know I should just let this thread drop, but there are still some
interesting aspects to this discussion.

In my humble opinion, too many programmers are too
complacent about their craft.  It is all too easy these days to
pick up something new, have some early successes, and think you
know all about it.

Me, I started learning programming in 1976.  And I'm still learning
programming.  I didn't stop learning when I quit school in 1980.

Then I take it you haven't yet learned object-oriented programming.

Learning programming is much more than just learning the peculiarities
of particular programming languages.  Take OOP for instance.  In my
opinion, no-one schooled in procedural programming can really understand
object-oriented programming without first feeling like a complete
idiot.  If you think you know OOP without going through that phase, you
really don't know OOP.

The realization that one must pass through through that "complete
idiot" phase is hard for many people to accept.  We don't like
feeling like idiots.  Yet, IMHO, it's often necessary to shake off
old prejudices and beliefs in order to learn and accept new things.

(On the other hand, IMHO, over time, the teaching of OOP will improve to
make the process less painful.  But then again, the need to teach new
tricks to us old dogs will decrease as we retire and more and more new
programmers learn OOP right from the start.)

But here's what I don't understand with this discussion:  Learning a
new set of arithmetic rules in a programming language really doesn't
compare with learning a whole new way of approaching programming or
a whole new operating system.  Many RPG programmers have made the
transition to RPG IV with little effort and few complaints.

Look, I've stated before that, sure, we could have made some better
design choices.  But we have a policy of trying to ensure that a
working program compiled several years ago will work the same today
when compiled on a newer release.  We can't go back and arbitrarily
change the rules, and our customers expect that.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com
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