Re: RPG on the Tiobe Index

You're experienced. You're not the growth of the language. Neither am I. We
are the base of the language. And I think that's true for all the languages.
Are they all skewed the same way, and book sales (or whatever) only shows
growth and not usage? And if that's true, then I think it would be safe to
say that those metrics would show the 'health' of the language. Eventually,
every programmer will retire/quit/die/whatever. The language will only life
if new people use it.

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Hans Boldt
And yet by your own admission, you do watch the TIOBE index!
Why keep track of the numbers if there's no value to it?

I don't put much stock in indexes that track Internet requests or book
sales. I write a lot of RPG code. But I don't search the Internet or buy
books on RPG. I refer to the IBM manuals or search Midrange Archives. Is
that just me?

If IBM were to publish the number of compiler licenses sold each year, I'd
probably watch that.

Also, I have argued that RPG is not appropriate for certain tasks,
such as CGI programming. But I believe you yourself have made
that point too!

CGIDEV2 and other toolkits make RPG a good language for CGI programming.
But on the other hand, CGI is not the best architecture for Web application
development, and IBM doesn't appear to be interested in extending it.

So, the community is kind of on our own, or using 3rd party interfaces. In
the past few years, my colleagues and I have deployed hundreds of RPG based
web applications. And they compete favorably against J2EE, MS .Net, and PHP
alternatives.

Nathan.




--
This is the RPG programming on the IBM i / System i (RPG400-L) mailing list
To post a message email: RPG400-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/rpg400-l
or email: RPG400-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/rpg400-l.