On 12/6/2013 5:38 PM, Jon Paris wrote:
Personally if I'm gonna use limited development/learning time on anything it will not be on ASCII art!
Self-education has always been an interesting problem to me. My very
first RPG program was an 80-80 list. Read a card, print a card. Not
really useful in the grand scheme of things.
But.
I learnt about F specs, I specs and O specs. Soon thereafter, L specs
and overflow, then the difference between heading time and detail time.
This all transferred quite well to an actual program that printed
customer lists, which moved on to level breaks and fetch overflow. All
of these listings were mostly useless or completely superfluous for the
work environment.
But they were marvelous as a way to learn how the cycle worked. Without
doing unpleasant things to the production data. My boss only had to
look at the F specs to see that I was using IPE - no way to update and
break things there.
Today, the cycle seems quaint when held up against subfiles and it's
downright anachronistic when compared to encapsulating business logic in
subprocedures which can be shared more or less equally between a 5250
app, a stored procedure and who knows what tomorrow? How do I (speaking
for myself alone here) manage to learn about this stuff without mucking
up a production system?
I think that can be a hard problem. There aren't many 80-80 lists
available in the world of subprocedures and JDBC drivers and Application
Servers. My first subprocedure was an inquiry (take a customer number
as a parameter, return a status) but it WAS in production code. I'm not
as afraid of breaking things now as I was back then, but the unknown can
be a scary place.
I see this er, project as an 80-80 list. It's independent of production
code, but there are a lot of things that I can learn. One of those
things - maybe the most important thing - is that I can really truly
integrate multiple languages into an RPG application. Before I can DO
that, I need to accept that I CAN do that, if you catch my meaning.
I suggested trying to port figlet.c to PASE; John suggested using Java
or Python or PHP - there are several options available to self-learn
about multiple language integration. That's pretty darned cool, and
because the output, the result, is well understood, there is always a
goal that can be set, seen and met. The ASCII art is like an Elvis
Presley movie - an excuse to hear him sing. Um, I mean an excuse to
tinker with PASE. :-)
I am facing the same chicken and egg problem with Python. I'd like to
do more, but my mind isn't open enough yet to see the possibilities
where Python is a good fit. If I find a Python 80-80 list application,
I'll share it :-)
Thanks for giving me an opportunity to share what I was thinking.
--buck
midrange.com
