Re: Is RPG dying

Henrik,

different perspectives in a discussion are the interesting part of it. Talking to people all sharing the same opinions might be easier, but its without the chance to learn from each other. I've staid rather close to the backend of the server side and one of my big projects in the last years (I'm working in this project at the moment again) is staging a huge data warehouse installation with > 1 Million complex transactions (consisting of about 50 elementar database operations each) every day. The process is running massive parallel and implemented in RPG (I've had not enough courage to implement in in Java about 10 years ago), it's for sure an example what might be possible using an <flame>ancient and outdated language like RPG</flame>, but there is a price to pay with hours of programming to reinvent already invented wheels.

With another of my big projects (the open source variant is called ArdGate) I went the opposite direction and implemented internal DB2 stuff mainly using Java and the programmers productivity is much more better than for a thinkable RPG variant. Peter Sault (maybe an alias) wrote some years ago in one of the RPG Hardliner Forums "Java is only the hope for lazy programmers" and I'm a lazy programmer and I answered to him :"This was the most valuable argument, in the debate RPG or Java I've heared the last ten years".

have fun with your work!

PS: what's SMS, Tweet, Facebook? and iPhone? is it the new rebranding of AS/400? - maybe I should ask one of my grandchildren.