Re: With the dropping of a few features from IBM i are there vendor software concerns?

I recall a conversation with Joe Frank <www.josephgfrank.org> in the 1980's where he said they needed a screen design tool and one of his programmers wrote the original SDA on a weekend.

When Joe was with IBM in Rochester in the 1970s he was the senior architect of the SSP operating system (S32, S34, S36).

He wrote a pgm in 8080 assembler that did 5251 model 12 emulation on a 5280 key to disk machine.

When IBM delivered the first IBM PC based on the 8080 chip Joe ported his code to become the first 5250 emulator.

That with the Emulator Transfer Utility (EDU) is what we started with in the early 1980s.

Jerry






On 9/25/2024 9:19 AM, Justin Taylor wrote:

I only use SDA for DDS menus. Otherwise, it's RDi all the way. You
couldn't pay me enough to use SDA instead.

As I recall, Jon Paris also had a lot of Mac issues with RDi. I'd guess
that most RPG developers use what their employers provide, and that's
usually Windows.


date: Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:55:46 -0400

from: John Yeung<gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: With the dropping of a few features from IBM i are there
vendor software concerns?

On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 9:50?PM x y<xy6581@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I bristle when I hear suggestions that IBM
proposes to discontinue SEU.

As Jim said, it's not on the list. So there's at least some reprieve
there.

While I find SEU unbeatable for speed, I don't like turning syntax
checking off. Without it, it might as well be a plain text editor,
akin to EDTF or Notepad. But increasingly, our codebase contains RPG
features too new to be recognized by SEU, and it sure is annoying
writing or maintaining code that employs those features.

I"ve been a fan of PC-based text editors since the days of CoDe and RDi

is

the first program I start every day. But RDi, as good as it is (and I
greatly appreciate its goodness), ain't the right tool for every job.

Even

with a gigabit internet connection to a fast machine 1100 miles away,

it's

slow. Live parsing is slow. SQL syntax checking, IIRC, requires a live
host. I get the dialing donut for no apparent reason. And apparently

RDi

is not everybody's favorite--it has competitors, with VS Code being the
first among equals.

RDi's slowness is a significant factor driving the adoption of VS
Code. Even Jon Paris, one of the most experienced and staunch
proponents of RDi over the years, says he tends to use VS Code more
than RDi these days, largely because of the difference in speed.

And SDA--well, maybe it's me but IMO
it remains a highly productive tool for building *and modifying*

displays

(recognizing DDS is going out of fashion with the cognoscenti).

This is where I'm 100% with you. Granted, I have not seen what RDi has
to offer on that front, but I haven't heard a single RDi fan saying it
can compete with SDA, for what SDA does.

And I don't even use SDA the way SDA fans use it. I use it almost
exclusively as a previewer. I actually edit the DDS by hand. But the
ability to visually render a screen is indispensable.

John Y.