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

Interestingly Java can be used quite nicely for very straightforward standalone apps without adding a lot of complexity.

I have married CL, Java, QSH and PASE together for years quite successfully for background processing apps.

Too many of the IBMi crowd still have bad memories of the hamburger flipping ads of the late nineties 😊

Regards,


Richard Schoen
Director of Document Management
e. richard.schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
p. 952.486.6802
w. helpsystems.com

-----Original Message-----
message: 6
date: Thu, 6 Jul 2017 15:31:32 -0400
from: Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: RPG easier/harder to use than other languages?

I think we are in in agreement on this Richard.

It has always seemed to me that OO was a terrific fir for something like graphical programming (browser or desktop) where inheritance of things like buttons, entry fields, etc. has real advantages. But all too often the purists rammed the paradigm down our throats as the solution for everything. In theory using OO principals also works OK with (say) types of bank account. In practice it only seems to work if the IT group can constrain the kind of non-sensicle "customizations" that are demanded by the marketing folks. All too often there are so many exceptions that it would have been easier and more maintainable to just write a few custom pieces and build the different account types from those rather than attempting to inherit the behaviours.

Java is often referred to as the "new COBOL" in this sense as it has become every bit as hard to maintain and update business apps as it was before. In the Windows/Browser/etc. world the order of the day seems to be more towards simply rewriting and to hell with backward compatibility.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

On Jul 6, 2017, at 12:56 PM, Richard Schoen <Richard.Schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Now there's some meat.

Thanks for those Jon. Made me laugh.

Reading that I thought it felt kind of like the purist view of database design and trying to get to 5th Normal Form in a database design.

Fine in thoery, but in practice, you maybe get to 2nd, 3rd or 4th normal form.

In terms of re-usable objects I typically think of RPG service programs, Java JAR files, PHP classes, .Net assemblies and web services which are all the concept of having similar code callable via an API which may contain objects internally but makes a developers life easier by bottling re-usable processes. And hopefully it's documented ?

Possibly some inheritence, but generally implementing some specific functionality that can be used across programs saving a programmer lots of time.

Only thing that really matters is testing the re-usable code, documenting the code and its usage and making sure a developer knows how to apply the re-usable code in a production app.

That applies to any language.

My three cents.

Regards,


Richard Schoen
Director of Document Management
e. richard.schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
p. 952.486.6802
w. helpsystems.com
------------------------------

message: 3
date: Thu, 6 Jul 2017 11:52:01 -0400
from: Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: RPG easier/harder to use than other languages?

This is quite an enjoyable and informative read
https://medium.com/@cscalfani/goodbye-object-oriented-programming-a59c
da4c0e53
<https://medium.com/@cscalfani/goodbye-object-oriented-programming-a59
cda4c0e53>

And this
https://content.pivotal.io/blog/all-evidence-points-to-oop-being-bulls
hit
<https://content.pivotal.io/blog/all-evidence-points-to-oop-being-bull
shit>


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

On Jul 4, 2017, at 7:02 PM, Richard Schoen <Richard.Schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Do you have some examples of how these former disgrunted OO devs have found OO programming to be flawed ?

Just curious since your statement seems pretty generic.

Regards,

Richard Schoen
Director of Document Management
e. richard.schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
p. 952.486.6802
w. helpsystems.com