Re: Future of RPG

[Steve Richter <stephenrichter@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004 11:08:22 -0800 (PST), James H H Lampert
<jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 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?

no.  Sun loses money. I am refering to the company that took the great
features of Java and made them usable on a real world platform.  The
result is called dot something.

> 
> 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.

all these names. language semantics are minor compared to the
importance of features that enable modular programming!! [  I bow to
thunderous applause. ]

-Steve

> 
> 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
> 
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