Re: RPG/COBOL/C

The best tool for the job is an ok answer. However, what advantages cobol
has over rpg may not be worth keeping your talent pools up to supporting
multiple languages. Especially when neither may appeal to the young
turks. "Back in the day" you pretty much couldn't get a computer degree
without some knowledge of COBOL while many learned RPG on the job. I was
fortunate enough to attend a community college that instructed both, on a
S/34. Now, you may have many newbies that you may have to train either
language on the job. Why support both? However, if you are marketing a
package to those who are coming from a mainframe environment, having it
written in COBOL may be an attractive environment, and may even help
sales. And God knows that people coming from a mainframe environment are
used to overpaying for software and that's where the big markups are. But
if you are staying with established iSeries shops RPGLE will find a bigger
talent pool than COBOL. And do NOT convert from COBOL to the older (by
over a decade) RPG/400.

Oh, if you are using CICS cobol then you really may want to jump right on
the RPGLE bandwagon. Teaching a newbie a new language, and CICS too, must
be a treat.

Instead of a straight language to language conversion you might want to
use this as a good time to redesign your application. Move to a MVC
format. Modularize the snot out of it so that you can take advantage of
SOA, etc.

Rob Berendt