RE: Future of RPG: What language would you learn?

Nathan,

Your missive about supply and demand brought to mind my own experience. When I started college, there was a big demand (or low supply, take your pick) for History teachers. By the time I graduated (with my major in History), there was an over supply of same. These things do, as you say, run in cycles.

Over the years I have been given the task of training new programmers. We usually took people already employed by the company. It was easier to teach RPG/Cobol to them than it was to teach programmers coming in off the street about the business and its processes, even if they had business courses at college.

All of that said, hiring companies almost always put their requirements in the form of languages and/or packages. Other want ads for any kind of programmer are scarce (around here, anyway), invariably they list multiple languages, not just one. And it was rarely the same mix across the want ads. [Personally, I think those kinds of ads are written to meet the qualification(s) of someone that they have already decided to hire but want to appear to be an EOE. But that's just an opinion.]

Sometimes it's hard to ascertain what the next wave is. I started reading up on SQL back in the 70's, but there wasn't any processor (to which I had access, anyway) that could actually use SQL. But part of the learning led to relational databases which, in concept, could be designed on even a System/3. But there was no telling that this was going to be a positive skill in the following years; in fact, my boss of the moment argued against it.

Jerry C. Adams
IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day. - Samual Goldwyn