RPG from IBM's Perspective

From: Jon Paris
In fact of course what they did was the exact opposite. They made the
price for the "legacy" compilers _lower_ than for the modern ones.
I'm surprised you didn't hear me scream all the way down there when
they first told me that!

Well, presumably the legacy compilers don't require much R&D.

Regarding new R&D, IBM is now asking for help in defining a direction for Visual Age for RPG. IBM's Brian Farr requested feedback from RPG Cafe participants recently on that topic. After receiving several requests for enhancements, Brian asked for suggestions on how to pay for them. Of course, nobody wanted to pay for them, and the most negative feedback was in response to the idea of IBM charging a runtime fee for applications.

Somebody suggested that IBM embed the cost in IBM i servers. The irony is that VA-RPG is a tool for migrating applications OFF IBM i to Windows desktops, but users want IBM i revenue to cover it. For some respondents, VA-RPG was evidently little more than a stepping stone to MS .Net language compilers.

Another irony is that one of the most requested enhancements was for a browser-based interface. I gather that they'd deploy the applications under Windows servers instead of desktops, and still ask that IBM i server revenue to cover it.

-Nathan