On 5/14/2013 12:02 PM, Dan Kimmel wrote:
RPG and COBOL are dead. No new development in these languages is being done. Others on this list may disagree: I ask them to provide concrete examples of development being done beyond a few modules in either language. That being said, there are millions upon millions of lines of code in both languages that will need maintenance and improvement for the next century or so.
The problem is that RPG and COBOL are just not tool-able to the extent others are.
No flames from me although I disagree for the obvious reason that OP is
looking for midrange job advice and I have never seen a midrange job
advertised that didn't want either RPG or Cobol. If you want a job in
the midrange space one of those is the make or break skill.
As for being dead, I might be persuaded to your point of view. I do,
oddly enough, have a different one :-) The binary 'new development vs
maintenance' paradigm turns out to be a faery tale. I bought into that
for decades but no longer.
I work with a back end that for all intents and purposes was New
Development in the early 1980s. It has been maintenance since then. In
the few years I've been working on it, we've begun to read and write
spreadsheet files, to exchange data with customers who haven't got a
large IT staff, but have Excel skills. We've extended the app to the
web via stored procedures. We're working on an intranet based dashboard.
I have Java running on the back end in production, side by side with my
ILE RPG. I still have users who insist on printed physical paper
reports. If that solves their business problem, I'm more than happy to
keep providing them. But along with those reports I also provide a
spreadsheet of exceptions, emailed to the responsible person. If it
turns out they want that stuff on the intranet we'll be able to provide
that as well.
Every single one of those things has been implemented as a maintenance
activity. Every single one has a very large RPG component. There was
never a full blown re-write, never 'out with the old and in with the
new.' Just maintenance.
So, yes. If we think of new development on all computing platforms
everywhere, RPG does in fact make up a tiny sliver. We might in fact
call RPG dead if that were the sole criterium. Open the iris and look
out there, and in truth, there simply isn't that much New Development to
be had. Which gets more activity, a new browser like Flock (oops, dead)
or maintenance on an old browser like Firefox or Opera?
Stop the iris down and look at our platform. What other language
besides RPG or Cobol is being used for new development? What other
language is being used for maintenance (surely the place most
programming activity lies)?
There's no single language you can learn that is going to carry your career. You're have to learn to learn new stuff every day.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! RPG is the entry point, but to excel,
one must be multilingual.
--buck
midrange.com
