Is CFINT IBM's way of getting rid of RPG?

[John Rockwell <midson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's a thought.  What if IBM thinks the only way the iSeries can
survive is by getting rid of RPG?  The thinking would go something like
this.

   1. Customers are tied to their legacy applications by the programs
they've grown accustomed to.

   2. These legacy applications taint the iSeries when it's competing
against the latest technologies because competitors dismiss
       them as old green screen applications.

   3. Most of these green screen applications are in RPG and a lot of
the more valuable ones are interactive in nature.

   4. Now what happens if we suddenly make a seemingly unrelated
marketing change, breaking the pricing of the AS400 into
       two separate features, batch and interactive, and then charge a
fortune for the interactive segment.  And let's make it even
       more interesting by tuning CFINT so it really does succeed as a
governor when you move to versions 4.5.

   5. How long will it take for RPG and the high price of the
interactive feature to be linked together, making new technologies
       like Domino, JAVA, et al, more appealing because they
conveniently run in batch as far as the AS400 is concerned (even
       though this changes the definition of batch a bit)?  Thus through
a little sleight of hand the argument changes from language
       vs. language (with a company usually having to rely on its own
in-house programmers judgment) to an argument simply
       over dollars (with a company having more than enough accountants
to make a case against the legacy system).

Just thinking out loud of course.  It also makes me wonder about the
requirement that you have to move to 4.5 (where the governor works very
well) to get to an 820 box.  I know we've been able to spike the
interactive well over 14% (our purchased interactive feature's maximum),
which wouldn't seem to be possible if the limit was truly a hardware
limitation instead of a contrived software limitation.  Some weekend
when no ones on the system I'm going to start a bunch of
interactive jobs, set them to 0 priority, and see if they can give the
governor a run for its money.  (Of course I won't change the class
priority value in case I have to re-IPL to get QINTER functioning
again.)  This assumes our contract with IBM has no clause against doing
so, of course.

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