RE: FW: IBM's RPG Strategy (was: Long Procedure Names) -- RPG400-L

Hi Joe,

This says specifically that the JVM crashes ON THE 400 over and over
again, with "anything moderately complex".  As it turns out, though, you
only know of one program that actually causes problems on the iSeries
JVM.

No, that's not true. I know of one program that CONSISTENTLY crashes the JVM on the iSeries. It crashes on other occasions, they're just sporadic making it difficult to nail them down to a particular program.

How about toning down the rhetoric just a tad, eh?

On that score, you're absolutely right. When I'm frustrated, I tend to type something that's a little extreme.

For what?  For web-page serving it's really very good.  For database
access it's really very bad.  As far as I can see, the big problem is
that you don't have a problem set for which Java is a good fit.


Or, perhaps there isn't a problem for which Java is a good fit...

I'm the first one to pound my shoe on the table over the fact that RPG
is far better than Java for programming business logic.  At the same
time, Java is a stunningly powerful language for user interface.  It's a
matter of using the right tool for the right job.

Why do you think it's a "stunningly powerful language for user interface"? Again, it seems to me that you're talking about software that's already been written. Because they happened to write JSF or Struts in Java, that makes Java a great language?

If the same things had been written in C++ instead, would C++ be a "stunningly powerful language for user interface"?

That's my problem with the whole Java thing. I can write the same thing in another language, and it requires far less memory and runs far faster. Why would I want to do it in Java? Only one answer comes to mind: portability.

C++ seems to fit somewhere in between, and is probably the best suited language for database programming in Unix (although I'd say Java is pretty good as well).

Well, I don't know about "actual" Unix, but in FreeBSD and Linux, there aren't a lot of people writing in C++. Usually it's either C, Perl or Python. Though, there are about 80 billion languages on a Unix system (give or take) vs. the iSeries where there's basically just CL, RPG, C, COBOL and Java.

Having said that, though... I don't do much database programming in Unix. Why would I use Unix for database when the iSeries does it so much better?

When's the last time you saw a benchmark that said this, Scott?  Have
you actually run production Java code?  Are you familiar with the JIT
compiler?  Thanks to the incredible work done by the JIT folks, these
days Java far outstrips any interpretive language and begins to approach
compiled code in performance, especially for computation-intensive
tasks.  In my arithmetic tests on my box (which is old and sports a
fairly out of date JVM), Java actually performs quite well with RPG.

I haven't done any or seen any benchmarks. It's based on my personal experiences. Every program I run that's written in Java takes much, much longer than C or RPG. Whether I wrote it or whether a vendor wrote it, it's always slower.

I'm not a Java expert, so there's a very good chance that there's something I could do, such as JIT, to improve performance.

But, RPG will perform well without me having to be an expert in it. I don't have to optimize it, or jump through hoops to make it perform well.

Anyway, I don't want to get into a long involved argument.  It's my
opinion that each language has jobs for which it is well suited, and
jobs for which it is not well suited.

I guess I haven't found anything lacking in RPG's support for CGI. It seems to me that it's well suited to both UI and business rules.

Many languages fill similar though not identical niches, and choosing between them is as often a pragmatic matter of expediency or personal knowledge as it is a purely objective one. But what I HAVE learned is that someone who consistently bashes a language just as a language has probably been using that language the wrong way.

Okay, well I guess I'm just an idiot, then,.