Re: RPG

Comments in-line John.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

On Jul 19, 2016, at 5:41 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 4:14 PM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

(1) the choice of
learning fixed vs. free does make a big difference,

That’s the one I meant.

Have you found that it makes a difference whether you are teaching
with SEU or RDi? I am guessing you have experience in both settings.
And also, when you say "non-RPGers", do you mean new to programming
entirely, or just new to RPG? Again, I suppose you have experience
with both.

Well we try and avoid like the plague teaching anything with SEU. Also of course it doesn’t support any syntax added after V6 so free form declares are out anyway without a surplus of green!

The majority we have taught have been java, PHP, C#, C++, and .Net programmers with a few “plain” C thrown in. They expect a more advanced tool than SEU which is another good reason to stay away from it. The companies who hire us tend to be more forward thinking and know that SEU will not help attract newbies.

I'm trying to suss out how much of the difference in teaching/learning
is the syntax and how much is the tooling or educational/experiential
background. I truly do not believe free format RPG would have been
significantly easier for me to learn fresh out of undergrad (when I
was still pretty fluent in C and Pascal, and reasonably comfortable
with Unix) than fixed format (which is what I did wind up learning, on
genuine dumb terminals).

I can only speak from my teaching experience. We did classes back in the old columnar days and it was hard going. Not so much initial coding but the errors that occur (and frustrate) when simply adding a character to a field name - thereby shoving all the other factors out of their boxes. Columns just didn’t feel right to the students and it just inhibited progress.

When V5 came along with free-form we found much less resistance and the students were far more willing to dive in. It was so much easier to get them involved. But the old columnar issues still arose in D specs. Interestingly (since most are taught to align data types etc. in their code) typing D specs with an editor (RDi) that understands tabs was not the issue. But they got so frustrated when simply changing a variable name caused a flood of errors.

V7 free- form declares - well the first class we did using this was like night and day. They got into it from the beginning with no frustrations and before we left were discussing which of the troublesome Java programs in the shop they could replace with RPG because it would better fit the task.

This acceptance of RPG as a good business language is a common thread in all the classes we have taught and when embedded SQL is included it is even more warmly received.

Now, it so happens that I was learning PDM, SEU, and a bit of OS/400
at the same time that I was learning RPG/400. It's a fairly cohesive
environment. SEU and columnar RPG just go so well together.

If you say so - personally I need the editor to understand tabs without me having to prompt. I dumped SEU as soon as I could.

When I first learned of RPG IV (just reading things here and there, no actual
compiler to try), I immediately recognized and appreciated most of the
benefits, from an academic standpoint. But SEU provides virtually no
help for free format. Indeed, I have always found, and still find,
that free format RPG in SEU is an unpleasant and cumbersome experience
(basically even worse than Notepad). For me, the picture changes
drastically when RDi is thrown into the mix. Suddenly it's free format
that is noticeably more pleasant and easy than fixed. (Well, OK,
technically I still have never used RDi. But I've gotten my toes wet
with RPG Next Gen Editor and extrapolated from there.)

Let’s just say that on those rare occasions when I am forced by circumstances to use SEU you can hear the cries of anguish from miles away!

I find RDi much better for fixed form too. The online help for one thing and the customizable tabs of course being part of it - but the Outline view (which Next Gen did not have) is a major plus.

So, I don't doubt your experience, Jon. I just find it hard to believe
I am *SO* outside the norm. (Then again, I am pretty heretical on a
few key fronts; most notably, I prefer to program using proportional
fonts. Fortunately for me, there is a small but vibrant and growing
community of programmers who share that preference.)

Can’t use proportional fonts in SEU. You can in RDi - just sayin’ <grin>

There are a lot of people who due to budget or whatever are forced to stick with SEU - but many (most?) don’t do anything new. There are many who frankly are too darn lazy to learn anything new because “I’m retiring in x years”. Others just make mods to old programs. I haven’t met many who have experienced other platforms who find SEU acceptable. Even former mainframes are happier with RDi because SEU doesn’t allow the Rexx scripting that mainframes editors do and so feels very limited in capability.

John Y.
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