System iNetwork

March 19, 2008

What's your favorite dinosaur?

So lately, I've been reading a lot of press releases that refer to RPG as an outdated dinosaur. Honestly, I've never gotten that impression based on the content that we publish in the magazine or online. Seems like we are always talking about RPG this or that. And in fact, I believe that Scott Klement's RPG Rules was one of the readers' favorite articles from last year. So, what gives? Why are product-producers so keen to move people away from RPG and toward a completely different skill set?

A recent article by Chris Smith from MC Press,

"Reliability and Simplicity Will Continue to Define the System i,"

in which Smith interviews IBM's manager of IBM's Power Systems Division, Ian Jarman, offers the following tidbit:

As to the future of RPG, Jarman acknowledges it is a 'specialty language' in the eyes of younger IT professionals, but knowing RPG can be a great asset for a young programmer who also has Web 2.0 skills.

And so I come upon one of KrengelTech's newest products, RPG-XML, a collection of RPG service programs that users can call right from an RPG program on the System i. The tool set helps RPG programmers use XML by composing and parsing documents and transmitting XML to remote business partners. So, companies can use their existing skill sets of RPG to produce and consume web services. But to be honest, I haven't run across too many products like this one.

So, my question is this: if RPG is so great and flexible and well-liked in the community, why are most of the new products moving away from it? Is something new, like solutions that use Java, necessarily something better? Are there lots of old-school languages that are falling out of favor with vendors but are still favorites with today's programmers?

Posted by ebradford at March 19, 2008 9:24 AM

Comments

IBM announced RPG in 1964 for the System 360 Model 20 as a highly simplified report generator. It was an instant success -- I know, I was an IBM SE tasked to install the unexpectedly large number of Model 20s ordered. But it wasn't designed as as a tool for developing other languages or to meet complex programming needs....that was for COBOL and FORTRAN and PL/1 in those days and is for Java and XML and its counterparts today. As long as there are massive reports to generate for someone to read, RPG will have a life....but for the increasingly complex interactive, GUI, web-based apps we are seeing today, the newer languages will rightly fill that job. It pays to stay in one industry for a lifetime ... you get perspective.

Posted by: Dennis Fletcher at April 1, 2008 10:29 PM

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