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rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote: . . .
Many of the people who argue against it would probably like it if it just came out.. . . wizards. . . . In fact, that's about the best comparison - a wizard.
. . . Rob, you nailed it.RPG was not, at its origin, a programming language. It originated as a band-driven report generator. The same sort of band-driven report generator that's built into things like dBase and so forth. In effect, a primitive form of "wizard." The only reason why it doesn't look much like a band-driven report generator is that it was developed back in the Hollerith card era, and so it HAD to be syntactically structured as a language that would fit in 80 columns.
It was given an absurdly concise syntax like that of no programming language ever devised, yet one that anybody who knew how to wire a plugboard for a unit record machine would instantly and instinctively understand.
The S/3, the AS/400's first recognized ancestor, was developed as a replacement for plugboard-programmable unit record machines. That was, after all, what IBM Rochester had been told to do: to develop a better unit record machine, not a smaller competitor for the mainframe computers IBM was selling. So RPG, with its bizarre syntax was a natural, since the job of writing software could be easily handed to the mailroom kid who knew how to wire plugboards.
-- JHHL
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