Re: Should the "RPG" language be renamed and to what?

On 4/7/2011 12:57 PM, Rory Hewitt wrote:

I pray this is a late April Fool's thread...

Surely if we've all learned one thing, it's that RENAMING IS A BAD IDEA. At
least when it comes to IBM.

None of us learned RPG because we thought it had a cool name, and I doubt
that if we rename it to anything else, that new CS students or whoever will
say "Hey, that sounds like a cool language - I should learn it instead of/as
well as Java/Python/C". Does anyone else believe that?

---Absolutely.

The first rule of branding, ask any top-line Madison Avenue heavyweight, is naming.

Atari paid $20,000 to the company that gave them the name.

"Visual Age for Java" or Eclipse? Which is better?

It's not the biggest factor in popularity, that much /is /true.

Alan

P.S. RPG lends itself to the GNU-type recursive naming, but I don't recommend it.
RPG Programming Language.

I learned RPG because I got a job as a programmer (with no computer
experience whatsoever!) and it was the language that they taught me, along
with CL. Then I went to another job and I also had to learn PL/I and then
COBOL and then C. The main point is that I learned these languages because I
*had* to, in order to do my job. I didn't (and still don't) care what those
languages are *called*.

I don't know whether RPG is being 'taught' anywhere in colleges in the US,
but I still see plenty of up-and-coming programmers in other parts of the
world (notably India), who are learning it because they believe, rightly or
wrongly, that there are RPG jobs available (they might also be learning
Python, but I doubt it, because there's a lot more competition for Pythin
jobs, and not such an established market). I've interviewed a number of
Indian programmers, and their skills vary wildly, but the best of them are
better than the vast majority of programmers anywhere else in the world,
including the US. When I ask them why they learned RPG, they say "To get a
job". Period.

Frankly, I think IBM should have stuck with "AS/400" and "RPG" and (maybe)
given RPGLE a new name, such as RPG/Free. BUt honestly, that's it. I don't
like change. I'm one of the younger RPG programmers too..

Just my $0.02,

Rory