If people don't get religious about code, or caught up in acronyms and
buzzwords, then it's not hard to envision sticking with non-/free RPG,
and even OPM. Equally, it's not hard to envision switching to /free,
and using ILE. I'm not embarrassed to say I have not fully embraced
ILE, and almost never use modules or /free.
Does that mean I don't care about modularity and maintainability and
all the other good stuff? Of course I care. And I have no
philosophical grudge against ILE or /free. So why don't I use them?
Because they are really, really clunky given my development tools (PDM
and SEU). I cannot tell you how much faster it is for me to write
pseudomodules using OPM RPG, and just pass things via *ENTRY
parameters. It is just as modular and just as maintainable as the
average ILE programmer's modules and service programs and whatnot.
For the people who cannot live without /free and ILE features, what
are you using for your development? WebSphere and Eclipse? (Honest
question, because I have very little exposure to AS/400 tools other
than what lives on the AS/400 itself.) I have to imagine you have
some fancy IDE that does all the boilerplate for you, and all the
linking, etc.
For what it's worth, my off-hours programming is almost all done in
Python, and ever since finding iSeries Python
(
http://www.iseriespython.com), I have been using it more and more on
the AS/400 at work. So I'm a weird mix of old-school and very
new-school programmer. Mainly, until ILE RPG is convenient enough
that I can spend more time on the problem at hand, rather than
wrestling with the tools and typing endlessly just to set up
parameters or compile a working program, I will not find ILE very
compelling. (Granted, as I said, there may already be wonderful tools
out there that I simply have not used yet.)
John
midrange.com
