Re: RPG from IBM's Perspective

Comments in-line Nathan.

On 27-Jun-09, at 1:00 PM, rpg400-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

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

That do require some work but admittedly not as much as the new ones. But that's not the point. Applying your logic the legacy compilers should cost only 10% or so (if not less) of the price of the current ones - but that's not how it is. Pricing is used for many things, and particularly in the computer industry rarely has much to do with cost. Pricing can, and should, be used to encourage people to upgrade. All the current pricing does is encourage management to stay in the past. Until of course the new CEO comes in and wants rid of all that "old fashioned stuff".

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.

You're making a composite of person out of two people - Brian Farn and George Farr I think.

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.

Here you are just completely wrong. I was part of the team that pushed for IBM to produce VisualAge for RPG. VARPG was not then and is not now targeted at moving people away from IBM i. The exact opposite in fact. It was designed and marketed as a way of having a thick intelligent client with _all_ data access on the i. It has weak to non-existent local file support. I can only think that you (and anyone else who saw it as a move to .Net) are confusing it with Asna's VRPG.

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.

Nothing new there. The problem of course is that we have all insisted over the years that we should not pay a premium for IBM i hardware (disk, memory, etc.). Now that the premium is gone we still expect that everything be included in the OS at no cost the way it used to be. But where's the funding? Those extra $s we paid for hardware were what funded all that "free" stuff.


Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com