Ugly green screen (was Re: The Truth About EGL ) -- WEB400

Just my opinions but here goes:

(Un)fortunately, the Death of COBOL has been predicted for literally
-decades-. And it isn't dead yet! There have been articles that
claim being a COBOL programmer will be "your key to future
employement" as baby-boomers retire, leaving millions of lines of
unsupported COBOL code.

--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

You might want to tell my neighbor that, he used to be a Cobol programmer
and now he's a meter reader for the gas company. We have almost zero
demand for Cobol programmers here in Southern California. We don't have a
lot of demand for RPG anymore either.

Out here in the real world, customers are not universally asking for
migration from RPG. There are many customers who wish to leverage their
investment in RPG and their staff, and would love to see you extend RPG
beyond a green screen language.

So completely true. If IBM had created a proprietary language, (visual
DDS?), that gave RPG programmers tha ability to program GUI on the 400
they'd still have plenty of customers. Green screen is seen as
anachronistic and does not attract new talent or more importantly, the
love of the people who are in charge of purchasing the systems.

Look RPG is an outstanding language and better than it has ever been at

the V5R4 level of the language and

will be even better at V6R1 and beyond,

Amen brother! /free + ILE kicks butt! IMHO it is in many ways superior
to OO languages I have programmed in. But in many ways it is not. Of
course, if we had a pretty GUI to wow the managers they wouldn't care if
the language behind it was OO or not.

but facts are facts. It is an old language and no amount of wishing or
marketing will turn it into a popular modern language. RPG as I said
before has at least a strong 10 year life, maybe much longer. It is

however on

the decline. Just look around your shop. How many young people (20's

even 30's) do you have in the shop? Who is teaching RPG? or COBOL for

that

matter.

And who's fault is that? If RPG is on the decline it's probably because
of IBM's complete inability to grasp what is needed. The platform is
fantastic, the OS is wonderful, and the coding language can handle any
business application you want to build - too bad no one outside the 400
"faithful" seems to know any of this. I thought it was IBM's job to let
people know?

I'll say it again, the green screen hampers us and has brought this
"decline" upon us. We just got a new CFO 6 months ago, he already wants
to replace the 400 - why? Simple really, he hates the look of the green
screen. To him, it shows that our system is antiquated and not up to the
challenge of moving the company forward. It boils down to looks. The hot
chick gets the free drinks at the club while the dog is ignored,
regardless of their respective internal qualities. It's the same for
people buying systems. You get their attention with the flash, you keep
them as customers with the "personality". The 400 has more personality
and integrity than any system on the block, but damn is she ugly.....