Re: Future of RPG

["James H H Lampert" <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I dont think IBM should change RPG either.  They should follow the
> example of that other company that consistently makes a lot of money by
> developing a new language that provides all the computer science 101
> features needed for modular programming on the as400.

<scratches head> Are you referring to Sun and Java?

Even if you're not, it's still an excellent example: they took an existing
language (C++), and built a derivative language (Java) upon it, a language
with an awful lot of strengths, no more than the usual number of
weaknesses, and very few GOTCHAs. And since they didn't want to pretend it
was just a new version of the parent language, they gave it a new name.

Likewise, consider the ALGOLs: Niklaus Wirth took ALGOL-60, and a lot of
1970s-era (and excessively prissy and academic) understanding of
structured programming, and created a language specifically for teaching
incorrigibles how to write structured code, and named it after a famous
mathematician. Then, when he saw people trying to use Pascal to write
production software, he decided, instead of adding production features to
that language, to create a new language, a production language, based on
Pascal. He called it Modula.

For that matter, even though the QBASICs pretend to merely be dialects of
BASIC, they are in fact a whole new family of languages, a family that
hybridizes BASIC with PL/I.

--
JHHL