My thoughts exactly...
I specifically sought out RDi when we went to v7r1 and some of the newer BIFs created syntax errors in SEU. It was only then I realized... "why didn't I do this sooner".
-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Yeung
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2018 11:54 AM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries) <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: SEU support for Free format in the F and D specs
On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 9:38 AM Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As Jon Paris pointed out, when WSCDi was included in the software cost
for the compilers, (It was never "Free") no one cared. As soon as it
became a separate product, then interest went way up.
Well, it's either ignorant, shortsighted, or disingenuous to somehow come to the conclusion that unbundling and charging separately
*caused* the increased interest. I'm not saying you are espousing this conclusion, because your very next comment is:
Part of that is due to feature/function, part of it is general
awareness, part of it was pure marketing.
So it seems you recognize that there are other factors at play. Which makes me question the following:
Been there / done that / not gonna happen again........
Rebundling, or lowering the cost, or including one license, or any number of other measures, if done TODAY, would NOT be the same thing as including WDSCi THEN. As you just mentioned, there is a lot more awareness today than there was then, and simply rebundling won't somehow turn that off. The feature/function factor is big. Not only is RDi vastly more capable than WDSCi, back then SEU supported all the latest language features; today it does not. I know some people claim that WDSCi always ran perfectly fine on hardware of the time, but I am also 100% sure that I and others did NOT find WDSCi to run fine on our machines of the time, whereas RDi runs fine (or at least comparatively
better) on our machines today.
It really irks me when people say "we did X before and it didn't work, so why would we even think about doing X again now"?
Doing the so-called "same thing" and expecting different results is NOT the definition of insanity. What's insane to me is behaving as though conditions are somehow the same for all eternity. The world is a different place now. Open source isn't just a niche thing anymore.
The current generation of programmers don't have the same sensibilities or workflows as the programmers from WDSCi's day. (And IBM does want to attract newer, younger programmers, right?)
I'm not saying that doing X now will *necessarily* work when X didn't work before. But I am saying that assuming it *can't* work now, and categorically rejecting it *because* it didn't work before is an uncompelling and lazy argument.
John Y.
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