Re: New RPG programmers

[Scott Klement <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
> In my experience, most SMB's and individual programmers don't think
> about ROI or TCO nearly as much as they think about the cost of entry.
>

Hmmm... I guess the way I'd put it is like this:

If the cost is small, a company will just buy it.  They don't really care
about TCO, etc in that case. However, if you can sit down and put
together a good, convincing, report that shows that the more expensive
product will save them money in the long run, they'll consider that too.

I guess in a way, it comes down to how much time/effort you want to put
into your proposal. It's easy to get approval for a $80 Visual Basic boxed
set, but much more difficult to get approval for a $600 VARPG unless
you're willing to spend the time putting together a proposal that
demonstrates how the latter will save money.

> And if someone is going to decide to learn a language on their own,
> with no support from any larger organization, how are they going to
> learn RPG?  What are they going to work with?

Why would anyone want to learn RPG unless they're being asked to by a
large organization?  iSeries is a small percentage of the shops out there.
If you're going to learn one computer language, you go for something
that's used everywhere.

The decision that you actually make is, do you want to actually spend
money to get something like Visual Basic or .NET or do you want to grab
something you can get free off of the internet, like C or Java.

Most people will be deciding between those alternatives. RPG is too much
of a "niche."