RE: RPG hard to learn?

I intentionally left out those details, hoping to reduce hijacking.



-----Original Message-----
From: Nathan Andelin [mailto:nandelin@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2017 3:33 PM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries) <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: RPG hard to learn?

Justin, in regard to the article that you read, is that available on the Internet, and could you post a link?

In regard to learning RPG - for me it was a transition from AS/400 COBOL to
AS/400 RPG III, which was an easy transition. PDM, SEU, and SDA were the same.

The challenge for me at that time was that I had just joined an IBM business partner that was supporting an RPG II code base, which ran in the
S/36 environment. It was my job to come up with new modular design patterns and RPG III program templates for interactive applications and reports. But I enjoyed that very much.

I have heard that it is common for programmers to learn RPG by copying from existing programs, rather than master the "specs" (i.e. the opcodes, %bifs(), and other syntax nuances).

RPG is especially well-suited for database and interactive workloads.