Hi Barbara,
Having an enhancement survey is a way to let the watercooler folks be heard.
I appreciate this perspective. However, wouldn't a Request for Comment or
similar be another option? Simply voting yes/no to something allows anyone to
vote and skew the results. Including those who vote once as well as those who
vote many times. If you have 100 one-time voters who just vote because "Joe
Blow" told them to vote for this feature vs. "Joe Blow" who votes 100 times for
his favorite feature, you end up with bad data.
I think there are at least 5 classes of or categories of enhancements to RPG:
(1) There are features that would be cool to have.
(2) There are features that need to be added (i.e., changed) to make the
language more intuitive and consistent.
(3) There are features that would make the language more popular.
(4) There are features that are needed because 90+ percent of the RPG community
would benefit from them.
(5) There are features that take the language into other areas of application
development.
Of these:
Class (1) items probably receive the most votes and also gets the least amount
of use once delivered. Example: %TRIM Future examples: More than 9999 records
in a subfile (I know subfiles are not part of RPG, but 75 percent of the
programmers I talk to, don't separate subfiles from RPG) And then there's the
infamous: "How can I get the value of a field, when the field name is stored
inside another field?" So the 10 (optimistically) programmers who want this
feature will be able to use it. Great.<tic>
Class (2) items are arguably the most important as they help new programmers
learn the language (apparently this is an important issue today) and also
reduces the frustration for experience and novice programmers who are using the
language. Future example: (Allowing comments or / (slash) directives to start in
the first non-blank position on the line, instead of in column 7 or later. New
RPG programmers end up hating the language after 2 hours of trying to get a
source member compiled with a /IF or /COPY statement starting in column 6.)
Class (3) items subjective at best. Certainly some goodness comes from these
types of features. But honestly wouldn't 3rd-party add-ons or even the
ever-popular "steal this code" open-source crowd fulfill this category?
Class (4) items are certainly as nearly as important or as important as class
(2) items. Problem is, the average "Joe Blow" programmer thinks his/her one
issue is also _the_ issue the rest of the world wants implemented.
Class (5) items are similar to class (3) items in their importance. Sure it
would be cool to have, for example, integrated CGI/Web built-in functions in RPG
IV, but that would have been important in 1998, or 2002 or 2004 or 2006. In 2008
and beyond it is sort of like adding Pointer Support to CL in 2006. Why do I
care? I've already coded all the CL I'm ever going to code. By 2008 or 2009 I've
already written tons of CGI/Web stuff using xTools, CGIDEV2, or Brad's eRPG
library or even using the CGI APIs so why would I care? (CGI/RPG is just an
metaphor here.)
-Bob Cozzi
www.i5PodCast.com
Ask your manager to watch i5 TV
midrange.com
