Re: Future of RPG

[Don <dr2@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't get it...why is it that local business people should be being
asked to foot the bill for doing IBM's marketing???

Uh, does Sun, Microsoft, HP........etc.....etc.... also ask local people
to foot the bill or do they just drop the boxes in?  But then, they've got
alot more demand for thier systems...gee...go figure why...

No, they're not dead, but they definately are dying...it's going to be a
slow death, but there is no question that they are dying.

Don in DC

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On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Chris Wolcott wrote:

> At one time IBM had a program where they would give an AS/400 system to
> a school if local business(es) would agree to supply instructors.  I
> thought this was a great idea on their part.  Does anyone know if they
> still do this?
>
> As far as the rumors of RPG's death being exaggerated, every one says
> COBOL is dead too but I haven't seen the hearse drive away yet.  There
> was nothing I couldn't do in COBOL that others could do in any other
> language.  For the most part it is a factor of how well you know the
> language, not how many fancy opcodes are in it.  (Any more it is how
> smooth the salesman is.  One company I was at was thinking of replacing
> DB/2 with Oracle on the 400, because the salesman had nearly convinced
> the top brass that DB/2 was dead. . . )
>
> Like any other language, the ease with which one learns RPG depends on
> the tutoring/mentoring available.  I was from a non-IBM mainframe COBOL
> background when I got a job in an AS/400 RPG shop.  All they gave me was
> an account and a couple of cassette tapes on RPG to listen to.  We
> maintained custom code in a 'canned' RPG application the company had
> bought.  The code was a mess, a mixture of cyclic and procedural logic
> and not commented worth a darn.  I kept looking for the 'secret decoder
> ring' to figure out the use of the indicators.  To top it off the
> listings were done via some program that indented the code, but also
> displaced the indicators in the <=> columns.  That made figuring out
> what they were doing quite difficult unless all three columns were used.
> Even with that, I was writing code by the middle of the next week.
>