RE: RPGIII to get a facelift?

[Scott Klement <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On the other hand, if you didn't bother to look at the Gentran product, then
> I'd say you made a bad call.  Especially if you were happy with Sterling
> otherwise.

I did check out their Windows product, as well as their AS/400 product,
and I also looked at other vendors, but it's really beside the point.

The point was how it made me feel when Sterling attempted to ram it down
my throat.

I wasn't going to go with their products if one of their competitors was
going to give me something comparable, because they might decide "hey, we
need another $10k from Klement, let's make him upgrade again!"  I no
longer trusted Sterling Commerce.

IBM has built the AS/400 and iSeries around a relationship of trust with
their customers. Customers know that when they write a program today,
it'll still work properly 10 years from now. They're proud of the fact
that their RPG II programs can still be run. They're proud of the fact
that programs compiled on CISC machines still run on RISC machines without
re-compiling.

You've seen my messages on this list before, yes? You may have also read
my newsletters or magazine articles. If you have, you know that I'm a big
proponent of RPG IV. You know that I'm also a proponent of free-format,
and that I think that people need to work hard to keep learning and keep
improving their processes...

Whenever I change one of my programs, if it's RPG III, I *always* upgrade
it to RPG IV. That's the way I do things!

But, there are still over 1000 RPG III programs on my system that haven't
needed to change. If I have to add a field to the customer master file, I
add it and I recompile everything.  If they take the RPG III compiler
away, I won't be able to do that.  I'll have to convert the programs and
re-test them, etc.  That's no minor difference.

So, even as a big proponent of RPG IV, forcing me to pay extra for the
compiler, or simply taking the compiler away would hurt me.

> I'm curious as to why you would have had to rewrite your EDI apps.  I moved
> from the Windows version to the iSeries with no rewriting.  Was the DOS
> version that different?

Again, this is irrelevant. The point was about how it made me feel, and
how it made me react, and was not intended to be an in-depth analysis of
Sterling as a company. It's very possible that I just had a bad salesman,
or a bad experience.  But, FWIW, it was the people at Sterling who told me
I'd have to rewrite everything, that the way it integrated with my apps
was completely different.  That was MANY YEARS AGO, water under the bridge
now.. it was just an example of how that type of pressure makes people
react.