On 18 July 2014 13:06, Nathan Andelin wrote:
This question is more about your dependence upon or perhaps even love for
the RPG language vs. your dependence upon or love for the IBM i platform.
Let's assume a wave of retirements at IBM Toronto, maybe golden
parachutes the team would be foolish to turn down. Armonk decides to
freeze RPG at the current release. I don't see a mass exodus from
fully frozen RPG to another language on i for several reasons.
1) The history of the platform is 'why change what works?'
2) I'm not sure why so many RPG programmers know only RPG, but I
suspect #1. If so, why would an RPG programmer learn C++ when the
current RPG base is working as-is? That would be a lot of work just
to keep the exact same functionality.
3) The workload needed to analyse and re-write all that RPG code is
immense. Managers would want to know the value proposition of Cobol
on i or C++ on i as a function of 'cost to rewrite on i' vs 'cost to
rewrite on Linux or Windows'. Factoring in the savings of having to
retrain (or lay off?) a staff of expensive senior RPG developers in
favour of much less expensive Ruby on Rails developers, of course.
Given the number of conversions off IBM i vs the number of conversions
on, I suspect this is where we'd lose installations.
4) We're a niche market, the midrange. There might be an IBM i
deployment somewhere that doesn't have any compilers on it, where
development is solely PHP or RoR or Java talking to the back end DB2
on i, but I've never heard of it. If the RPG developer pool were to
become suddenly obsolete, the vast majority of IBM i installations
would immediately fall into #1 or #3 because of #2.
--buck
midrange.com
