RE: IF

Charles,

A faint glimmer of hope appears in the dark :

We are having more and more developpers complaining that they are blocked by another developper who has already transfered the source they want to work on into their development environment. Someone proposed this idea : we create a form in a folder accessible by all. If developper 2 wants to take source1 which is already being modified in another project by developper 1, he writes it in the form so that developper 3 can come and do the same and everyone will be able to see whats going on. The idea was forwarded by email to everyone so that they could comment on it. Everyone has replied <Ok>. Now it's my turn. I will propose creating modules for business logic, DRY techniques, encourage the use of procedures, etc. Another of advantage of this should mean less developpers wanting to work on the same module.

-----Message d'origine-----
De : rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] De la part de Charles Wilt
Envoyé : jeudi 3 juin 2010 17:39
À : RPG programming on the IBM i / System i
Objet : Re: IF

David,

You have a choice, pay now or pay later.

There are numerous studies that show the fact that over the
life of a program, a considerable more amount of time is
spent maintaining the code than was spent writing it in the
first place. And that any time
(cost) spent in development improving maintainability is well
spent and paid for many times over the during the life of the program.

Readability is a huge factor in maintainability. Readability
also helps reviewability, reduces errors, and helps debugging.

I suggest picking up _any_ book about software development
practices and giving it a read, then pass tibits or the whole
book to your manager.

Honestly, it saddens me that we RPG'ers are still fighting this fight.
It's over and done with for every other developer on the
planet (well except maybe the COBOL guys :)

IMHO, the fact that we are still willing to write code
without considering the maintainability is one reason our
platform is in decline. The poor maintainability means it
takes us longer to make changes, management sees that as
being due to the platform, not the development style, and
they simply move to a platform they see as more responsive to
their needs.


HTH,
Charles


On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 9:58 AM, David FOXWELL
<David.FOXWELL@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This I like best. Although I'd need to have the code in a

procedure from the beginning as I rarely see code moved, it
just ends up getting copied. You are lucky to have the
liberty to code that way. If I wanted to move :

If (
    myDogsColor <> gBLACK and
    myDogsColor <> gWHITE
  );

I'd like to code
If IsColored ( MyDog )

But I'd probably end up with
 IF NOT AcqDogClrFl ( MyDog : error )     // AcqDogClrFl =

acquire dog is colored flag !

And then I'd get slapped for all those extra lines of code (
prototype, interface, beginning, end)

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