RE: Free Form RPG Opinions Wanted

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Joe Pluta wrote:

> If I am a shop that's running just ducky on RPG II style code, and I have
> programmers who program that way, and we're making our numbers and beating
> our competition and doing what we need to do, then how can you possibly
> justify making us change our ways?  Just because you, Jon Paris, don't like

If you are an RPG II shop, then what the heck are you doing using free
format?!?!?!?  Don't use it - you will lose your competitive edge.  You
haven't lost a thing.  You've still got your MOVE and everything is
working just dandy.  An RPG II shop doesn't give a flying leap if MOVE is
or isn't in free format code.  My goodness, it's not like we're going
around ripping out perfectly good functionality from RPG II!

> If the extended factor two were supported on RPG IV, then we'd have the best
> of both worlds, and if you really, really needed indent/undent, you could do
> it, while my example client above wouldn't be disallowed the use of the new
> features.

Your example client doesn't want the new features because of all the time
and money that would be spent learning them and testing them.

> > Any op-code that requires you to know the exact data type and size of both
> > fields before you know what the hell will happen is in my opinion a bad
> > idea.
>
> I'm not being flip here, but why should it matter what you think about the
> MOVE opcode?  Isn't that assigning an awful lot of weight to your viewpoint?
> Because I would counter that any programmer who doesn't understand every
> opcode he uses and the side effects thereof is in my opinion a bad
> programmer.

It matters what he thinks of it just as it matters what you think of it.

Any program that doesn't make clear in it's code what is happening is a
bad program.

> This isn't kid stuff, it isn't supposed to be easy, and if you can't take
> the time to look at a compile listing, then you ought to be thinking about
> alternate lines of employment.  This silly notion that every line of code
> ought to be self-documenting is the single stinkiest pile of dung I've
> smelled in a loooooooooong time.

Maybe I'm high on the fumes, but why should someone waste their time on a
compile listing which is seperate from the code if the the code itself can
make clear what is happening?

> Self-documenting code is for the button pushers - the ones who want to point

Right - assembly for me!  Heck, manly programmers write out the 1's and
0's themselves!

(replying to a rather personal put down in another message):
It doesn't matter how many billions of lines of RPG a person has or hasn't
written.  Someone with very little RPG experience may have just the right
insight to improve the language.  So may someone with millions of RPG
lines under their belt.  But millions of lines do not make someone right,
nor does less experience automatically make someone wrong.  Every
achievement is done by someone who has never done that thing before.

James Rich