Re: Is RPG dying

This was a very good perspective, Buck. I was going to make some of those points but you did it. I'm messaging you because the thread is already too big.

Miss your intellectual acumen in cpf000. Sorry now for the sometimes caustic tone in some of my "retorts" over there. You did make me think more than most.

Your friend,
Alan

P.S If you ever visit South Florida let me know...



On 2/21/12 12:27 PM, Buck wrote:

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