I too have known copy-n-paste "programmers" even in the RPG world. I had one that was a contract programmer on my team about 15 years ago - I assigned him a project and asked him to be sure to code it in RPGIV. He was enthusiastic since he hadn't had that opportunity yet (seriously?). Then he dragged the project out for weeks - should've only taken a couple of days, even with the shell code I provided him to start with. In the end, in order to get it done by the deadline, he just copied a standard JDE program (OPM) that he knew and made the necessary mods.
Everyone on this thread has brought up some good points. Biggest one is that the IBMi world just isn't represented on Stack Overflow. So yes obviously we wouldn't be represented.
Thanks everyone,
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L <rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Steve M via RPG400-L
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2020 1:15 PM
Bob,
I wanted to ponder your thoughts for a bit before offering my own. I, like so many here, began my coding life in high school, on a mainframe, with disc packs that needed to be changed based upon the compilation language and keypunch cards. I fell in love with not only the analytical side of it, but the artistic side of coding, as well.
Herein lies where I offer my thought on your posting. Per Stack Overflow, (this is off of their site) - "Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow is the largest, most trusted online community for anyone that codes to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. More than 50 million unique visitors come to Stack Overflow each month to help solve coding problems, develop new skills, and find job opportunities."
Our worlds, RPG and COBOL, were not built upon the foundation of laziness (back to this in a moment), but instead were built on the foundation of education and the good ole' school of hard knocks. We learned the language, we studied its nuances, we tried and failed (again and again), but we learned each time along the way. It was, for most, an inner pursuit of growth.
Code sharing was done within an organization; you arrived and learned their "style and techniques" and intertwined that with your personal experiences from elsewhere. There was no internet, so there was no global sharing of knowledge beyond conferences, books, and job changes. But in a way, that kept things much less muddied, much cleaner, as the language's uses expanded.
Today's generation (trying to figure what age to say here without offending
someone) are about volume, not style (here comes the laziness part). They are about how many languages can I say I code in and not about how good am I in each language. They are about copy and paste and not about sitting down and talking through the project (architecting and designing) and about coding and failing and learning and coding again. I routinely encounter these so-called developers who copy and paste from websites, deliver a working product, and have no more idea how it works than I do about the inner workings of the Saturn V rocket (okay, I know I dated myself with that one). But you know what I mean.
At the end of all of this, I guess what I am saying that the RPG and COBOL developer, for the most part, would find a site like Stack Overflow (a copy and paste and move on site) to be insulting. Yes, we would achieve the result, but our developer mentalities won't let us stop there - we need to understand it, maybe not master it, but be able to do it ourselves the next time. That other generation will be back to copy it again, the same code, in a month or even a day or two later, because they didn't learn anything, they simply used the working example and moved on.
I may be way off base with all of this, but I truly believe that the most common user of these sites have very little interest in learning the how and why; they simply want to copy, paste, and repost as if it's their own.
Then, show off their GitHub pages with dozens and dozens of examples, not one of which they have written themselves, all of which are amalgamations of other's work.
IMHO.
Steve Meisinger
-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L <rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Bob Cagle
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2020 10:34
I just read this summary of the 2020 Slack Overflow annual survey:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/stack-overflow-developer-survey-2020-progr
amming-language-framework-salary-data/
There are no references to RPG or Cobol.
There are a couple of references to DB2: it ranked second to last in least used database. And if you look at the full survey, DB2 ranks #1 as the most dreaded database.
I know we are a small community, but I'm surprised that neither RPG nor Cobol were referenced at all. Could be that hardly any of us hang out on Slack Overflow?
So does the rest of the world not consider us "real" developers because we aren't using what they consider "real" languages?
I remember taking a class on C++ back in the mid-90s with a co-worker of mine. The first day the instructor let us know that C++ was a "real"
language, and nothing like those "sissy" languages like Basic or RPG. My co-worker immediately raised his hand and let him know that we were both RPG programmers. The instructor told us that we would have a hard time in his class then. We both passed with perfect scores; proved him wrong.
Just curious - anyone else ever experienced this type of bias?
Bob Cagle
IT Manager
Lynk
midrange.com
