Re: OS/400 command set

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Dr Syd Nicholson wrote:

> I think one of the biggest battles the iSeries has with other systems is
> the hype. There is a lot of hype for alternative systems, but nowhere
> near enough for the iSeries. Most non-iSeries companies have never even
> heard of the machine

Hype?  Well if you consider user enthusiasm as part of hype then maybe
that is true.  But what the iSeries "suffers" from is that it is boring.
That's why it is a good business platform.  It doesn't excite people to
try new things.  And not because it is expensive or hard to get (Sun and
DEC and others aren't cheap either).  When I was first exposed to a Sun
SPARC 10 I thought, "Wow, I could try some really interesting things on
this machine".  Some years ealier when exposed to the S/36 and then later
to the AS/400 I didn't have such a reaction.  Indeed, I thought, "There's
not really much to do on this computer".  That thought was reinforced at
my job when a senior programmer told me, "We don't do rocket science on
the AS/400, just business programming."

That mantra of "just business programming" is why the AS/400 suffers.
Mind you, it is very good at "just business programming".  But it doesn't
pique the interest of the development community at large.

Perhaps with the new languages and other features being added the iSeries
will become interesting.  But I believe that by and large it is still
"boring".  If you are not interested in business software there is
relatively little to do on it.

James Rich