Re: why rpg and not cobol

On 4/18/2013 12:30 PM, Stone, Joel wrote:

RPG and COBOL should never have lasted 50+ years until 2013 - that in itself is remarkable and a testament to the value of locking clients into a specific hardware brand & OS.

Why do Americans drink coffee in the morning instead of soup? Once
enough people adopted that behaviour, an ecosystem grew to support it.
Coffee makers, grinders, many flavours and styles to buy in grocery
stores, shops that sell the stuff made-on-the-spot. Imagine trying to
get those millions to switch to soup, with all that infrastructure
they'd have to rip out and re-create!

Why do midrange programmers use RPG? The infrastructure was put in
place many years ago, and now it's become too ingrained to simply swap
it all out for Cobol, Java or even beautiful PL/I.

But from an outsider's perspective, it is mind-boggling why IBM didn't shut down proprietary OS's ages ago. So one could argue that IBM has stuck with Rochester thru thick and thin when all other H/W and S/W companies had abandoned the proprietary approach decades ago.

You are the IBM CEO, responsible for ensuring IBM continues to make a
healthy profit. How does disrupting your customers' demand for
continuity help you do that?

Even though you disagree with my argument, surely you must agree that if Iseries only ran popular languages such as C and Java, it would be long gone???

I think this ignores many other examples in the software business. Why
does Microsoft continue to sell Windows? Continuity. Why does
OpenOffice read Word documents? Continuity. Why does Oracle continue
to sell at all in the face of the 'free' alternatives? Continuity!

The 'what if the midrange only ran C' question ignores the path that
brought us to this place. We run RPG because RPG was close to the way
tab machines were programmed. And way back then, the midrange market
consisted of customers using tab machines. IBM came up with a way to
move them forward into general computing while allowing them continuity.
Neither C nor Cobol would have filled that demand for continuity and
thus was born RPG on the midrange.

--buck