Re: RPG hard to learn?

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 4:03 PM, Justin Taylor <JUSTIN@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I was reading a magazine article that was a thinly veiled advertisement for a tool to migrate RPG to another language running on i. What really caught my eye was "any developer can learn and use [language]", with the implied contrast of "not every developer can learn and use RPG".

Given that we're talking about the i, the possible values for
[language] are comparatively limited. I wonder if we're including the
new crop of dynamic languages (namely PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, and
Python).

I learned RPG a long time ago, and for me it was "falling off a log easy". What do you guys think, is RPG difficult?

I think there's a lot of nuance in this question.

There are large parts of RPG that I consider "falling off a log easy".
These parts are similar to, and in many cases even easier than,
learning the analogous features in, say, C. If you just look at these
parts, RPG seems like a run-of-the-mill statically typed,
procedural-imperative language of similar abstraction level and style
as C. And just about as easy to learn as any other language that fits
that description. (We're talking Fortran, Pascal, and their ilk.)

But I found some areas of RPG less easy. First, if you were never
formally taught "database programming" (I fall into this category),
then some of the built-in database stuff could be very foreign, like
matching records. (I have still never learned how to use this, though
I did find it reasonably easy to acclimate to the cycle in general.)

Second, and for me this is the big one, nothing quite prepares you for
display file programming. But then, this isn't something easily
migrated to another language, so I'm not sure if this aspect was
included in that magazine article. Also, "display programming" in
almost any language is going to be Its Own Thing, distinct from and in
most cases harder than "back-end" programming. So, to be fair, is RPG
display file programming harder than desktop GUI programming or Web
browser programming? On balance, probably not. Some things surely are
easier in other languages (and other means of display!), but they
introduce a lot of other headaches too that simply don't arise in 5250
display programming.

On the whole, I'd say RPG is a pretty easy language to learn, and
pretty much always has been. I know that educators like Jon Paris are
finding newer RPG easier to teach than older RPG, but in my own
personal experience, I honestly don't think it would have made much
difference - in terms of difficulty of learning - if I had started
immediately on RPG IV rather than RPG III or even RPG II.

John Y.