Re: What would you do without RPG?

Hello Peter,

On 7/19/2014 11:33 AM, Peter Dow wrote:

That's an interesting perspective, and sounds very much like a
programmer's perspective.

Well, I am a programmer... :-)

What about operations? Do you consider the IBM i's work management to
be about the same as Windows or Linux?

This is a good point.. IBM i does have vastly superior work management capabilities to other OSes... the ability to segregate into subsystems, ability to control time slices and so forth.

What about the integration of the database with the OS - is that not
a big deal? I tend to be isolated from the operational side myself,
but I keep hearing about dedicated personnel required to handle say
SQL Server's database administration, lots of tweaking of indices,
cleaning up, reorganizing, etc. Is that only larger shops?

I have been, primarily, running MySQL in Unix environments (aside from IBM i) and haven't found that additional/dedicated personnel were needed to manage the database.

That might change if users were given query tools and able to ad-hoc query anything they wanted to... but, I think that would also be true of DB2 for i.

I like the database integrated with the programming language a whole lot, but moving to a language like JAva, PHP, Python or Ruby would eliminate that deep integration. This is one of the reasons I cited that I would stick with a native language like ILE C++ rather than use one of these others.

Integration with the OS itself... well, this is something I like... but not sure it's going to make the difference between staying/leaving the platform. It's kind of a minor thing.

Then there's messages, job logs, ability to look at details of a job
(open files, call stack, etc) as the job is running that I miss a lot
when working on a Windows machine. Are similar things available on
Windows or Linux that I'm not aware of? (I wouldn't be surprised)

This is an important piece to me...

It was one of the big reasons that I gave for sticking with a native solution like ILE C++ rather than using something like Java, PHP, Ruby, or Python. These environments use the Unix-style of error handling rather than the job logs, et al.

Is there something similar on Unix or Windows? Yes, sort of, but it only handles (1) Messages that your program sends to them (i.e. you have to write code to send them), or (2) A small handful of fatal OS errors (such as segmentation faults). It is nowhere near as good as the IBM i solution.