Re: WDSC vs SEU

From: Buck

The perception that PDM users have about WDSC is that is it too much
work for too little additional benefit. That's what my fellow employees
tell me and that's what we've seen posted here on this list.

No, it's not PDM users. It's your fellow employees. Have you been reading
the comments on this list? There are very few people that say WDSC is not
worth it, and lots who say it's pretty damned good. Please re-read and find
out how many people are NOT using WDSC.

Oh gz. If you can't learn Ctrl-F5 you need a new job.

The key here is to listen to the newcomers and not dismiss their
concerns. Ctrl-F5 is just one of many things they'll have to remember
in their first week.

Nobody is dismissing their concerns! But to say that learning Ctrl-F5 is
some sort of showstopper is simply unacceptable.

How much more productive? Sure, use the outline view to follow a field
around and don't forget to manually refresh that view after editing
or...? How much more productive is it to use right-click, Show fields
than F15/split? Especially when you can't copy/paste from the list of
fields in WDSC and have to open the DDS anyway?

Are these really arguments, Buck? Or are you grasping at straws? I refuse
to listen to the argument that it's too hard for a program to refresh the
outline. That's whining. As to right-click, show fields, that's not what
I'm talking about, I'm talking about expanding the file or the data
structure in the Outline view.

As to copy/paste, I don't even understand what this means. What are you
copying or pasting? The field name? Hell, just type the first letter and
hit Ctrl-space.

I got where I am from simpler tools first. I'm experiencing some degree
of frustration and I'm an avid user:

You probably won't like this, but Buck, you may be an AVID user, but there
seems to be a lot about the product you don't know. At which point you
might say, "that's my point!" to which I would respond that you need real
training.

I can't imagine how newcomers are
dealing with it. I feel more productive than when I use SEU/PDM, but I
don't feel say, twice as productive. Who knows what those words mean,
really?

I do. I can do things two, three, four more times quickly in WDSC than I
can in SEU and PDM. Having 200+ lines of code on the screen, having content
assist on fields and procedures, having online help for BIFs... these things
make it so that I can often write code in one third the time or less than if
I had to sit and look up things in InfoCenter.

Granted, a lot of my productivity is because I use newer language features
like qualified data structures, but even in basic RPG IV you're still going
to see a marked improvement, and just the extra lines of code will heop even
in RPG III.

And that doesn't even take into account the benefits of cross-platform
development which are utterly unavailable in the green screen.

I've already switched, for a decade now. My challenge to you is to
convince the newcomers that switching from PDM to WDSC is hard to
justify. Can you recall a post from a newcomer that went like this:
'Just tried WDSC. Loaded quickly and ran flawlessly. Does everything

I

need and I'll never use PDM or SEU again!'? I can't.

Yes I do, Buck. Every time I teach my class, that's what 9 out of 10

people

say. They love it.

Cool! I can't recall a post here on this list saying that. Can you?

Uh... yeah, lots of them. Do you actually READ the posts here? Or do you
just delete ones by people like Diane?

Way back in February, System i Network ran a poll, and about a quarter of
the people said "I love WDSC, SEU Reeks". A third said it was too buggy,
and that's reasonable for version 5 and even 6, and another quarter said it
wasn't complete (the rest didn't know what it was). That was over six
months ago, and even then that's a far cry from your claim that all PDM
users hate it.

How can we as a community help them? That's a serious question, not a
cynical blow-off.

I don't know... do what I do. I don't hype the tool so much as say I can
show them how to do their jobs in WDSC, and that in most cases it will be
faster and easier and more productive, and in a few it will be a little more
work. The tradeoff is simple, and the benefits are unmistakable.

I can't really afford that, but if I could, what would that cost me in
roundy numbers? Figure a burden rate of $125 an hour and 7 people and
don't forget the opportunity costs. So 40 hours * 7 people * $250 an
hour comes to $70000 plus the cost of the teacher's fee, lodging, meals,
travel, maybe $5000?. Let's say $75000 as the cost of getting taught
WDSC.

I can't speak to the productivity gain... it seems smallish to me, but I
haven't the experience you have teaching it. I'm just an informal, if
avid proselyte. Can you give me a roundy sort of number for the ROI;
when will my investment in my fellow employees get paid down?

I figure it this way, Buck. If they get just a 10% gain in productivity,
regardless of all your garish numbers, then a free week is paid back in ten
weeks.

Of course, many of your people will be immediately more productive. And
this will also point out the folks in your organization who aren't going to
crest the technology curve, because as so many on the list have pointed out,
this technology -- IDE, mouse, Windows -- is the future.

Not to mention the fact that by NOT getting them on WDSC you're actually
holding them back. Your company is holding back your employees, keeping new
tools out of their hands, by allowing them to forestall the future. It is
simply so much easier to code with content assist than without it.

This is what I mean when I say that nobody knows what 'productivity'
means. If I can see a full function on the screen, I might make fewer
mistakes, meaning fewer bugs to catch. Colour coded tokens might help
me pick out fields from operation codes, fewer bugs, etc.

But how much more productive, in the end, is almost completely the
subjective view of each individual programmer. And the 'how much' is
greatly influenced by the initial expectations she had when trying WDSC
in the first place.

Maybe it's because I don't over-hype, Buck. All I say is that I can show
you how to do every one of your daily tasks in WDSC, and be more productive
in many of them. Then I can show you things you can do in WDSC that you
can't do anywhere else.

All but the complainers are usually on board. And you know who the
complainers are. And if your staff is entirely made up of complainers, then
that points to a different problem, one that no tool is going to fix,
because it's a management issue.

Joe