RE: Please vote for Syntax check in /FREE!

["jt" <jt@xxxxxx>]

| -----Original Message-----
| [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Hans Boldt

| Joel: If we do that traditional RPG enhancement poll again, you'll
| have your chance to vote on it. But personally, I think we have
| enough good polling data to last us a couple more releases. For this
| item in particular, we do indeed already have a very good idea how
| popular it would be.
|
| Cheers! Hans

I don't have time to be anything but blunt, at the moment.  I wanna debunk
THIS myth, however:

You and a lotta folks at IBM are VERY SADLY *MISTAKEN* to believe you have a
"very good idea" of what the "average" user of RPG even DOES, Hans.  I
didn't get very far in college, but I got far enough to understand the
concept of how a *statistically random* sample can allow a small sample to
accurately measure the whole.  (You do NOT have a statistically random
sample with these polls, btw.)

You think procedure overloading is anywhere even CLOSE to a necessity in
**business application** design??   If you took a poll of ALL the RPG coders
(and I mean every last stinking one of us, not the people who frequent these
lists) then making RPG more object-orientated would be SO far behind
improving SEU that it wouldn't EVEN show UP as a choice on the poll!!!

I'm not gonna be popular with this list, of course, but imo (and I'm
*fairly* certain the opinion of the VAST majority of ALL RPG coders) you
wasted a lotta resources implementing /FREE, before you EVEN thought through
how to effectively syntax-check the stuff.

I'm sure it's made ToroLabs very popular with the folks that frequent this
list though, and is part of Software Group's "grand" design to FORCE all
coders to move to Java.  Well, here's the view of that strategy from someone
far more educated than I am:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/09/20#a1762 (Comments were also
interesting, although I don't understand but 'bout half what they're talkin'
about, and clearly shows which people have a very highly vested interest
(financial (career-wise) and/or emotional) in J2EE, btw.)

Who loses?  When it comes to a day when a person with a 2- or 4-year degree
with a SOLID basis in computer fundamentals can't EFFECTIVELY get the job
done?  Well...  Businesses pay MUCH more by forgetting KISS, and jobs go to
India as a result.

I apologize to those on this list, and IBM, who actually believe that
operator-overloading and object-RPG is a necessity for business application
design...  It isn't.

Good tools are.