Hi Pete,
<snip>
1. Can we do anything to get the over 50 (40?) crowd to embrace the
more modern development techniques that RPG (and IBM i) has made available?
2. Can we do anything to compel the under 30 crowd to give RPG (and
IBM i) a try a see what a superior business language it is?
#1 - I think that is a losing battle. So many folks have checked out in
the i/RPG world.
#2 - Great potential. Trevor pushing to get the YiPs going in Common
and the "pick up and run" attitude of guys like Justen and Brian that
are working closely with IBM (Steve Will) to establish the
YoungiProfessionals.com site and push for more "young" folks to get
involved in the "i" world, all of this has borne some fruit.
I'd love to hear if there are any community things that can be done to
promote the issue raised by #2. Common gave birth to the YiPs and they
are moving forward on their own with the support of IBM and Common.
What else can be done?
</snip>
1) I hit 40 a few weeks ago (sigh) and I so far successfully resisted puting my ILE Concepts Manual back on the shelf and reaching for the pipe and slippers. It is not a matter of age. You're only as old as the code you write. :-)
2) Employ them. Simple as that. I have employed and trained 10 ILE RPG trainees in the past 2+ years. 9 of them under 30 years of age. We give them 6 weeks in the classroom (locked up with me!!!). They learn free form ILE RPG and use RDi / RDp - SEU is banned and they think it weird and quaint. This is followed by a guided real-life project to work on, and then a supported introduction into the general development community.
So far we have managed to keep most of them.
Regarding the earlier post about time allowed for training and development - we give all of our developers 2 weeks per year. This year our focus is "Innovation" and we already have proposals from developers to build prototypes or tools using regex, XML Dom, JSON, XMLi and Graphml. I don't know whether we are lucky or whether the developers simply respond to a nurturing environment, but we have a happy bunch of very innovative developers (and development managers!) and we are the largest RPG shop in Australia.
I think the fight is still worth the effort. (and yes, our IT Director ordered RPG-OA as soon as it was available - "to see if we can do something with it". That is the kind of attitude that gets you writing good code!)
Cheers
Larry Ducie
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