Re: RPGle - i wish i could do some 'Reflection'

On 10/30/2013 12:22 PM, John Yeung wrote:

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Buck Calabro wrote:

On 10/30/2013 10:54 AM, John Yeung wrote:

If you are a little more adventurous, go with PHP or (iSeries)Python.
PHP has IBM support, but Python is arguably a better language. I
can't speak much to PHP as I don't use it, but the main thing I would
recommend is to not try so hard to take RPG so far out of its comfort
zone.

Good advice. One thing to remember though, is that many of us learnt
RPG by looking at and modifying existing RPG code. There isn't much of
an existing IBM i Python code base for Python beginners to learn from.

True. But there isn't much of an existing RPG codebase for the kind
of non-RPGish things being talked about here, either.

Very true. Tool makers do have a different take on things than
application programmers. My poorly articulated point was that the...
the learning mode of many of us RPG programmers was to dig into the code
and off we'd go.

The thing with RPG is that it is so tightly coupled to the underlying
platform. Most of what's quirky or tricky to learn about it comes
from the IBM i (and its predecessors). The "universal" stuff in RPG
is dead-simple. Anyone that can program in any language whatsoever
can pick up those parts of RPG in practically no time flat.

Quite right. One thing that RPG newcomers get by poking in production
code is (eventually) the discovery of RPG patterns. What op codes do we
use to fill a subfile? How do /we/ convert MMDDYY to *ISO? Things like
that.

In contrast, the things about Python that might seem weird to RPG
programmers are all fundamentally aspects of Python itself, rather
than platform-specific. And there are TONS of Python books (dead-tree
as well as electronic, including some freebies on-line), tutorials,
blogs, forums, mailing lists, etc. Python's official documentation is
quite good, and includes a wonderful tutorial (which is how I learned
Python myself). I daresay there is a lot more Python learning
material out there than RPG learning material.

There is indeed much, much more learning material available for Python
than there ever was for RPG! The problem for DIYers is that we can't
readily tell which Python patterns to apply for which business problem.
That will come with experience, but that 'experience' has already been
baked into the existing RPG code base.

--buck