Buck,
Old programmers never die. Years back, when I was looking for a job, I
contacted a dairy around here that I knew had an iSeries system. The
president of the company was very polite, but, he said, "My two guys have
been here over 20 years, and I don't think they're going to retire."
Jerry C. Adams
IBM i Programmer/Analyst
Playing baseball for a living is like having a license to steal. -Pete Rose
--
A&K Wholesale
Murfreesboro, TN
615-867-5070
-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Buck
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 11:28 AM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Is RPG dying
On 2/16/2012 11:42 AM, Chamara Withanachchi wrote:
There is some talks going on in Sri Lanka among some developers they
say RPG is dying and IBM is no longer invsting on it.
I used to participate in these threads but lately I've learnt that such
ideas aren't based in facts - IBM has released new RPG functionality in each
of the past 4 or 5 releases. The 'RPG is dying' idea is based on the fear
that I won't be able to find a job programming in RPG.
This fear is very real for those us us over a certain age. If our job goes
away, who will hire us? Especially at our previous salary? In this regard,
contracting and consulting has taken away more RPG jobs from me than
anything else.
It is true that universities don't produce RPG graduates in any notable
numbers, but I would say they never did. Almost all the RPG programmers I
know (myself included) are self-taught; not the product of a formal RPG
educational system.
20 years ago, the typical small business owner needed a business programmer.
Business programming meant Cobol, C or RPG. Today, the typical small
business owner still needs business programmers but she also graphic
designers for an attractive web site. Today, that means Java, PHP, Ruby.
This is what we see in the 'Help Wanted' adverts.
But that doesn't mean that these businesses want to throw away their Cobol
and RPG back ends. They want NEW web front ends, and they use the Ruby team
for that. They still use the RPG team to keep the back end running. I see
the Java and Ruby demand as an additional demand to the RPG programmers, not
a replacement for them.
RPG is not dying. It is stable. We lose a few programmers, we get a few.
Cobol is stable. Fortran is stable. APL is stable. All have been around
for decades and all will continue to have a job market for the foreseeable
future. Not a growing market, but a stable one.
The danger to us RPG people is that we just wait around for our applications
to become so obsolete that the employer finds it cheaper/easier/faster to
replace them wholesale rather than maintain them. We need to be very much
aware of the need to keep our applications useful in the new business
conditions we all face.
The good news is that computer science and practice has advanced a lot in
the past 20 years, and we can apply many of the lessons learnt to our own
systems. For example, we can start test driven development even if we are
the only programmer in the company. We can do things ob IBM i that few Java
programmers can do. We can write a stored procedure in RPG! We can access
our database with native record access or SQL or even both in the same
program. We can call C routines directly from RPG. We can do a lot of good
with RPG on IBM i.
In a very real way, the success of RPG depends upon you and me. We need to
use RPG to solve the business problems our employers may not have discovered
they have (yet). I'm doing that here, and I bet you can do it there!
--buck
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