RE: RPG, 10 years from now

-----Original Message-----
From: albartell [mailto:albartell@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 10:01 AM
To: 'RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries'
Subject: RE: RPG, 10 years from now


> >I doubt if it will be enhanced any further in 10 years, but it will still
>>be around. A compiler written today will still work in 10 years.

>To the contrary, it will be changed more in the next 5 years than it has in
>the past 15!  I am working on a blog entry for imho.midrange.com on this
>exact topic.  I attended the rpgworld.com conference this past month and had
>the chance to hear George Farr discuss "potentially" where the RPG language
>could be going. Of course he has to be vague because they haven't completely
>and publicly committed to the feature list, but what he was brining up got
>me excited!

they have to keep their plans a secret so the competitors dont steal their 
ideas?? I dont think so.  The enhancements to CL were kept secret and the 
result were subroutines when what was needed were CL procedures.  I respect the 
people who work at IBM, but their record of creating great programming 
languages is not very good.  More public input might be helpful.


>My favorite bit of info he shared was their thought process of determining
>how the next versions of RPG will interact with the user. Specifically
>speaking they were mentioning new OPCODE's like EXUI (vs. EXFMT) which would
>give us the ability to "execute" a ui that was a web page, or maybe a WML
>app for a blackberry.

Aaron, why does a programming language have to be concerned with the devices 
attached to the computer?  That is what APIs are for. 

the great success .NET is having shows how run time frameworks and programming 
languages should work together and what features they should have.  RPG needs 
to be like C#. It needs namespaces, function overloading, try finally blocks, 
classes, delegates for event programming, data struct member functions and of 
course managed code for memory managment. 

C# knows nothing about talking to a blackberry.  why should RPG?   

-Steve