Re: Are we not developers?

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
To: RPG400-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Are we not developers?

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/
<https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/stack-overflow-developer-survey-2020-programming-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




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