RE: RPG easier/harder to use than other languages?

The stereotype of the copy-and-paste 5250 programmer unfortunately has a lot of truth to it.



-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Rützou [mailto:hr@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, July 03, 2017 4:53 PM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries) <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: RPG easier/harder to use than other languages?

RPG has been a fantastic language for creating OLTP systems with a mix of BL/DB I/O and simple I/O devices such as 5250 and SCS output streams.However simple I/O devices such as 5250 and SCS output streams is technologies of the past and that removes much of the justification of RPG simply because 90% of coding today is about connecting a varity of devices and reformatting the RDBMS column/row model into hieracical data objects where OO capabilities are much more suited for manipulation of such objects.

However there is still a lot of RPG programmers out there who is reluctant to move out of their RPG comfort zone but time will remove them either by their age or the decline in legazy systems.New programmers arriving on the IBM i platform will have other comfort zones and why learn RPG if they just can install java, node.js, phython or other modern languages on the system?

Yes, it may create a mess of different program languages around a system, but who do you think will win the battle eventually? The past or the future?