Re: Switching to WDSC/RDI from SEU

Buck,

There IS a 'to die for'. WDSc makes you MORE productive. Which means that
YOU have more time to get more done. This is a benefit to you, and a benefit
to the business.

And while it is difficult to quantify the exact amount of time saved, most
people I talk to can claim 4 to 12 hours a week over PDM. Splitting the
difference and giving you an extra day a week to code is definitely 'to die
for'... A 20% productivity improvement is nothing to shy from.

Certainly an investment of two days of time ~now~ can be justified if you
will gain more than two days in the rest of the year??? Claiming limited
time is not a business case - you must invest to get something back.

Trevor



On 1/9/09 4:06 PM, "Buck" <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Terry wrote:

I think WDSC is probably a great tool if your planning to "webify" your
business or some such thing, but for those of us in the trenches trying
to support our business with limited time, money and manpower, there
just doesn't seem to be any tangible benefit in moving to a slower and
more failure-prone editing environment. Also, I think us COBOL'ers got
the short end of the stick in terms of WDSC enhancements ;-)

I'm definitely a green-screen-only developer. That is, I develop RPG,
CL and DDS. No web, no Java, no EGL. I use WDSC every day. I haven't
had WDSC 7.0.0.6 crash ever. I did crash it by monkeying around in the
XML files back when 7.0 first came out. It's been very, very stable for me.

The number one thing I get out of it is more screen real estate. I can
see more lines of the program I'm working on than I can with SEU.

The number 2 thing I get is the ability to edit multiple members
simultaneously. DDS (subfile changes) and the HLL program that uses it.
Very closely related to that for me is the ability to edit the SAME
member twice. I can open up the Definitions (top of the code) in one
pane and the Calculations (middle of the code) in another pane and
change them both at the same time. (Ctrl-2)

Colour coding is nice but it's a distant third place along with offline
verify. Other people have different things they like.

As Thorbjørn said, there isn't a 'to die for' use that WDSC gives that
SEU does not. It's incrementally better at many of the things I do when
I edit, probably the most useful example of that is the ability to
copy/paste across the edges of the screen. It's a pain to copy/paste
say, an example from email into an SEU session.
--buck