Re: RDi vs SEU (was: Standard source file names?)

Buck,

Let's not forget that in the early days, IDE's were big and bloated (well,
they still are) and *slow*, and they were the only other option.

I used SEU and loved it (but I also used lots of extra nifty features that
many people didn't), and every time I tried an alternative, it was just TOO
DAMN SLOW. Horribly slow to load the file from the AS/400, reasonably fast
to edit, slow to write back to the AS/400. Yes, I'm deliberately using
"AS/400" here...

Basically, the benefits never outweighed the drawbacks to me. I could get
more done with SEU. But then, I knew the codebase well enough that I knew
where to look to find the files and definitions that I needed.

Plus I was writing in PL/I a lot of the time, and only SEU had (and still
has) a PL/I syntax-checker.

Rory

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 4/1/2015 5:30 PM, John Yeung wrote:

I don't have the exact time frames to hand, but there
was a multi-year period when IBM bundled all the compilers and all the
development tooling into one price. If you bought a compiler you got
all the other compilers, SEU, PDM and WDSC all together.

One thing I still am not sure I ever found a concrete answer to: Back
then, did they actually LOSE MONEY compared to what they would have
gotten had WDSC been a separate-cost item?

If the answer is yes, then, well, I guess I really can't make much
further argument about the WDSC bundling experiment. If the answer is
"no" or "there's no way to know" then for me, the question is:

OK, so then what's wrong with a low adoption rate?

Nothing, per se. The low adoption rate speaks only to the fact that
this market genuinely feels that SEU is Plenty Good Enough. That's not
the case for me. If we had XEDIT (also green screen) instead of SEU, I
might not have switched to RDi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XEDIT

I maintain that the issue was never about the cost - everybody pays for
SEU and SEU is pants. The issue was never about SEUs superior
capability because the most primitive version of Code/400 had regular
expression search, colour tokens, sane copy/paste keys, lots of code on
the screen - SEU never had even those minimalist functions. So why did
they not try something else - something IBM was pushing? Because SEU is
Good Enough for what they do. Now, with this as a working hypothesis,
what has changed about that population cohort that would cause them to
move from SEU today? Because that cohort doesn't even bother with the
90 day trial and if we like car analogies, who would turn down 90 free
days in a Tesla S? People who like their AMC Pacer, that's who.

Don't get me wrong; if one likes one's Pacer and that Pacer does
everything one asks of it, and one brings home the groceries with it,
one may never miss how the Tesla feels, and that's perfectly fine. But
that's not me. Much as I loved my Pacer, I need something a bit better;
at least something with airbags and a trailer hitch.

If you (or IBM or whoever) cares about adoption rate, and you're NOT
losing money, then why NOT just put it out there?

If I remember it correctly, the issue was that customers who wanted to
keep on using only RPG, PDM, and SEU wanted cheaper licences - in
effect, they wanted to stop paying to develop Cobol and WDSC when they
weren't going to ever use either.

In other words, it was a political-marketing decision, not an economic one.

--
--buck
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