RPG: Not Dead Yet

Wow. One of the things you learn very quickly when writing a blog like this is that you never can tell what subjects will result in reader comments and which won't. Of course with a subject such as "RPG is Dead ..." we expected a few comments, but given that the original article was also open to comments the number of posts surprised us. Our post was even mentioned in the Angus blog.

One thing Mel's original post succeeded in doing is to get RPGers thinking--and talking--about why RPG is a great language and is indeed being used routinely to create new and modern business applications. Maybe that was his intent all along--to get the community to rally around the great language that is today's RPG. We could always give him the benefit of the doubt on that. ...

In terms of RPG being an "old fashioned" language, many situations in the IBM i world contribute to this perception. Not the least being the number of IBM i ISVs that continue to deliver software written in RPG III. And these are the big guys, the ones with multiple 0s at the end of their annual licence fees. We're not sure what they do with all those dollars. Maybe they need it because maintaining the old RPG/400 code is so much less productive than the newer, more modern syntax?

Several customers that we have talked to recently use heavily modified versions of one of the biggest ERP packages in the IBM i community. They had all stopped implementing maintenance releases as they had reached a point where applying the fixes to their heavily modified code was just not practical. They either did not need the enhancements or had already implemented similar features on their own. However, as part of their move to V6 it was necessary to update to the latest level. These are go-ahead shops who long, long ago moved all their own code to RPG IV. Imagine their disappointment when they discovered that this expensive "latest and greatest" release was still predominantly RPG III with RPG IV
being apparently used only in cases where the size of the program had exceeded RPG III's limits!

It's hard to understand why ISVs wouldn't convert their programs, if only to help with on-going maintenance chores. The two RPG flavors (as long as you stay away from the pure ILE aspects) are so compatible that the package in question has actually been successfully converted to RPG IV by relatively small shops (in one case by a one-man-band) that recognized the benefits of making the transition and got tired of waiting for the ISV. Just the extra white space alone, let alone tooling such as Rational Developer for Power and all of the other features of RPG IV, makes it so much easier to read and maintain compared with RPG III.

We've always been surprised that IBM hasn't applied more pressure (or incentive?) to large ISVs to keep their applications even moderately up to date with the modern system's capabilities. Strangely, we heard recently that one such ISV announced that their next release will require IBM i 7.1. Dare we hope this is a signal that their application code has been modernized to require it? Nah, that would be too much to expect.
 

New Champions; New Products

Last week's COMMON event was memorable in many ways--not the least of them being our rather
protracted trip home. The journey took more than 28 hours and left us with less than 20 hours before we left again for our next trip. Serves us right for wanting to go home and do the laundry at least!

One of the highlights of the week occurred during the conference's opening session when IBM announced the latest inductees into the ranks of IBM Champions for Power Systems. Three of our favorite IBM i friends--Scott Klement, Aaron Bartell and Jim Buck--were added to the list and we couldn't be happier. All of them have done so much to promote IBM i on Power and, in particular, to demonstrate just how far you can go with RPG. The page hasn't been updated yet, but eventually they should be appearing on the "Meet the Champions" page. Jon is hopeful Aaron might support his proposal that the champions be known as "Power Rangers." Susan, however, is less than thrilled with this idea.  

Not only was Scott named a "Champion" but he was also named this year's recipient of the Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship, which "honors an individual who exemplifies Al's commitment and dedication to the i community, is a mentor to others and is an advocate to the i community." We don't think you could write a better description of Scott if you tried--other than perhaps to add that he is also a terrific educator, dedicated father and train lover.

We're delighted to note that both Aaron and Scott will be speaking at our upcoming RPG & DB2 Summit in Minneapolis, so if you want to congratulate them both in person you could join us there.

New Products

We mentioned in a previous blog that we had had a sneak peek at a new product in the IBM i market that intrigued us and that we'd tell you more later. As it turns out there were such a wealth of new application-development products and major enhancements to existing ones announced during COMMON that we don't feel we can do them justice within this blog. Instead we are going to spend a little more time getting to know more about them and then we'll write a product roundup in a few weeks in IBM i EXTRA. If you want to be sure you don't miss it, you can subscribe on the IBM Systems Magazine website.

We will just briefly mention two that caught our eye. The first is the new Long Range product from Lansa. This product is targeted fair and square at the mobile market and is quite a departure for the company in that it not only supports use from Lansa, but also has an RPG version that allows you to write native mobile applications using RPG. The second involves Profound Logic's UI builder, which can now be used from other languages in addition to its role as providing the UI interface for Profound's RPG Open Access product. The initial roll-out demonstrates its use with PHP, which as regular readers know is a favorite of ours, but the company plans to document the tooling for use from any mainstream language on virtually any platform.

We'd like to mention more but you'll just have to wait for the IBM i EXTRA article to appear. There are just too many to talk about. We certainly live in interesting times.

Back to the Future

That headline seems particularly apt for this week's blog. Why? Because on Thursday we head for Anaheim and the iBelieve event immediately followed by the COMMON conference. 

iBelieve is a new event, focused on the future of the IBM i platform. It's sponsored and organized by looksoftware and is free of charge, so the only barrier to admission is any travel costs you might incur in attending. There's a great lineup of speakers and topics so we encourage you to check it out. So that is the "Future" aspect.

The "Back" part relates to COMMON. This will be our first appearance at a  COMMON event for more than two years. During that period both of us have remained members and volunteers with the organization--we just haven't been speaking at the conference. We wrote extensively about why we had made the decision to take a break back in 2009. In the intervening period COMMON has indeed changed--not as much as we had hoped it would, but the changes coupled with an improved financial outlook for our own company make attending this year viable. It will be great to catch up with some old friends again.

But there's also a "Future" aspect to attending the COMMON conference. We've heard from a number of software vendors who are planning to launch new products at (or shortly before) the conference. Since our speaking load is lighter than at past COMMON conferences, we're planning on devoting more time to talking to the application-development tool vendors in the expo and will report back here on our findings. Some of the advance information hints at some really exciting developments. We've already had a sneak preview of one such product and we've tried it out ourselves (hint: on our iPad and iPhone!). We can't say more yet, but we'll fill you in after its announcement next week.

We don't want this to become a product review blog, but this is a critical time in the IBM application-modernization world and since we'll be able to discuss the products with the developers and other IBM i users it seems too good an opportunity to miss.

In addition to speaking and touring the expo we have two other public experiences planned. On Sunday evening we will be at the IBM Systems Magazine booth #404 from 5:30-6:30 for a "Meet the bloggers" appearance. Bit like a book signing but without the books? Then on Tuesday at lunchtime we will be manning the "Expert Bar" on the IBM stand. If you are the conference please drop by and say "Hi." We always enjoy meeting our readers.

The Pi That You Can't Buy (Yet)

In previous blog entries, we've talked about the falling number of students enrolling in computer science programs and the impact this has on the availability of new programmers. Today we attended a lunchtime lecture by Professor Chris Tyler at Toronto's Seneca College. Tyler is a man who is part of a movement that aims to change this situation. The lecture was part of the Toronto User Group's annual TEC event and a huge "thank you" to the user group for bringing such a timely subject to the community.

Tyler's lecture began with a discussion on the findings of a group from Cambridge University in the U.K. as to the causes of this drop in interest, which is pretty much worldwide. In essence the findings were that while today's students are very tech savvy, it is purely from a user standpoint. They have little or no idea what is "under the hood" and perhaps more to the point, are usually actively discouraged from playing around with the home PC because Mum and Dad need it for their banking, shopping. Facebook, email, etc. That's a very different situation from what those of us who had (say) a Commodore 64. When you powered up a C64 the first thing you saw was the word "Ready" and you were in the Basic interpreter and being actively encouraged to program away. Not only that but for the hardware minded, the machine came with a complete schematic of the entire circuit board, had exposed edge connectors that a simple kit from Radio Shack could plug into, etc. This is very different from today's almost hermetically sealed home PCs.

The Cambridge group's response was to come up with a bare-bones computer that was designed for:

• Ultra low cost--$25 or $35 if you want the optional Ethernet and USB capabilities
• Encouraging experimentation by being open to hardware extensions and software programmability
• Using open-source software 

The result was Raspberry Pi. A credit-card sized all-in-one computer system based on an ARM processor, which is the type of CPU that powers most of the smart mobile devices in the world. To find out more you can go to the Raspberry Pi Foundation's website.

So where does Tyler's group at Seneca fit into the picture? The group had been working for a while on an ARM processor version of the Fedora Linux distribution and offered it to the foundation as the base operating system for the Pi. The result of this collaboration is that the Pi will have an incredible range of free open-source software available for it right from the get-go. In fact Chris' team has managed to create a distribution that is 1.6 Gb in size and fits on an SD card (that's the type in your cell phone or camera if you're not sure what we mean). When the card is plugged into a slot on the Pi and the machine is powered up, it will automatically begin the configuration process, including setting the whole of the card, whatever its size, up effectively as the system's hard drive. A very clever idea. Change the SD card, change the OS!

Sometimes You Can Te Too Successful!

The foundation's initial plan was to produce 10,000 units. When they went on sale Feb. 29, the servers of the two vendors handling the sales were stalled by the sheer volume of people trying to order one. They took orders for 350,000 before closing the ordering system. If you want one, the best you can do is to "register your interest" and those expressing interest will be notified when a new batch of orders can be taken. Even when orders are opened up again, it's anticipated that not all the registered interested parties will actually be able to place an order. That's success on an unprecedented scale. To get on the list of interested parties, register with one of the two distributers here  or here.

One of the other fascinating things about the project is that even at these incredibly low prices, everyone in the supply chain makes money and the foundation will be able to be self-funding.

Back in 2007 we blogged about another very low-priced computer targeted to the education of children--the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. We found out from Tyler that the latest incarnation of the hardware for the OLPC is also ARM-processor based and will be running the Seneca group's Fedora software in the future.

While Raspberry Pi and OLPC are both oriented to making inexpensive computers for purposes of education, the goals of the two programs are quite different. OLPC laptops are intended to be used "as is" to provide a wide range of educational materials on a wide variety of general topics at very low cost, whereas the primary goal of Raspberry Pi is to encourage kids to experiment with the computer itself, encouraging primarily IT innovation and education.

We're excited about the prospect of reawakening an interest in technology careers in kids. It looks like Raspberry Pi offers a good inexpensive vehicle to help us get there.

We're already on the waiting list.

Lawson Software Users Flock to RSE (or at Least They Should!)

It's conference season again! For us, that means travel season--even more so than our normal travel schedule. Most of the conferences we attend are hosted by local user groups. We were in Wisconsin in March for one of our favorite events--the annual WMCPA conference, followed by our own RPG & DB2 Summit, which involved quite a lot of interaction with the MMSA user group in Dallas. One interesting aspect of both conferences was the increased number of younger developers in attendance. WMCPA always has a few because their president, Jim Buck, usually brings a group of his students along to assist and participate. But we were very pleasantly surprised to see the number of younger folks at Summit--we're used to Aaron Bartell being the youngster!

The following week (now) we're at the NEUGC event--a unique event where multiple local user groups in the area pool their resources to put on a successful and fun conference each year. Once again there seem to be a few younger folks around, but the really good news is that overall attendance is up. We should all applaud that. Next week, we head to Fort Wayne, Ind., for an all-day session focusing on RSE hosted by the local user group there. Then the day after returning from Fort Wayne, we head to Sweden for a developer conference there. The following week our own local user group, TUG, holds its annual TUG TEC event, which is followed by the grandaddy of user group conferences, COMMON in Anaheim. We'll be speaking at COMMON this year for the first time in a while; it will be nice to see some old friends again.

So what does all this have to do with Lawson? Today at one of Susan's RSE sessions at NEUGC, she had the pleasure of making one person really happy over the idea of using RSE to edit source code. In fact she was positively ecstatic. Many SEU users are happy when seeing the productivity features of RSE than leave SEU in the dust. But ecstatic? That is the reaction you get when you're a programmer who can't even use SEU to edit her RPG source code!

What would programmers be using instead? How about EDTF (Edit File)? Never heard of it? It's the green-screen editor for IFS stream files. You can get to it from WRKLNK. Imagine: no PDM or even SEU. Just WRKLNK and EDTF to edit your source code. Next to EDTF, even PDM and SEU look like the greatest programmer productivity tools ever invented. If you've not had the pleasure of using EDTF, perhaps you can remember eons ago using a truly rudimentary editor called EDLIN. EDTF is a tad more advanced that EDLIN but not a lot.

Why has this person been editing RPG source with as primitive a tool as that? Because her source code is stored in the IFS and it was the only editor that she knew of that could edit IFS stream files.

She's not alone. More and more shops are finding themselves in the position of having to edit source code in the IFS because Lawson's recent releases started storing and shipping all of their source in IFS files rather than source members in regular source physical files. Who knows why they would decide to make that rather strange decision? Perhaps someone out there among our readers can enlighten us. Perhaps even stranger is the fact that Lawson doesn't seem to have told their users that RSE is the way to go for editing the code.

Regardless of the reason, the effect has been a dramatic drop in programmer productivity among those RPGers who must make changes to the Lawson code because EDTF is the only obvious way to do it--at least if you're limiting yourself to green-screen tools.

Now the person in Susan's NEUGC session today has learned that RSE (packaged in RDP/RDi/WDSC) has no problem whatsoever working with source stored in IFS stream files, and hence her unbounded joy. RSE can seamlessly handle IFS files for editing, compiling, etc., in exactly the same way it works with source members for the rest of the IBM i community.

This individual wasn't the first Lawson programmer who couldn't wait to get her hands on RSE. One of our recent private classes was to an entire group of Lawson programmers who were equally ecstatic over the prospect of leaving EDTF in the dust.

Now, if we could only get the rest of the SEU users still out there to a have similar revelatory moments about how much more productive they could be ...

Calling All RSE/RDP Users--Vote Now!

Back in December we blogged about the RSE wish list. But lately, we've discovered that it seems not many of you followed up on our suggestion, so we're taking another shot at it.

IBM developerWorks has a place for submitting and voting for your favorite requests for enhancement (RFEs) for RSE (and/or other Rational products). Many of the requests we have heard most often from RSE users are already on the list. If some of your favorites are already there, add your votes to help direct IBM's development efforts to the features that the most users want/need.

For example, we took a look at the top 20 voted RFEs for Rational Developer for Power Systems. Some of our favorites are in the top 20, such as an SQL prompter, the ability to re-indent /Free-form RPG code and--our personal pick--support of RDP running natively on Mac.

So there are some great RFEs out there. But the sad thing is the small number of votes that have been cast for the enhancements. Given how many RSE users we hear from who want some of these functions, there should be (at least) hundreds of votes out there for several of these RFEs. But when looking at the top 20 RFEs by number of votes, as of yesterday, we found fewer than 50 votes for even the most popular ones.

Susan taught two RSE sessions yesterday at the RPG & DB2 Summit in Fort Worth, Texas. Each had enough people present to double the votes for nearly all of the requests if every student present voted for them.

Just as Susan challenged all of her session attendees to go look at the submissions and vote for their favorites, we're now challenging all of you out there. You can put in your own suggestions as well. But make sure you check to see if something close to your own requirement is already out there so that you can simply add your own vote.

It's easy to add your opinion. Go to the website and create an IBM ID if you don't have one already. Under "Browse RFEs," look at the top 20 voted RFEs. Then choose Brand: Rational, Product family: Design & Development, Product: Developer for Power Systems. There are many other ways to browse and search for RFEs if you don't see your favorites in the top 20.

Don't just sit there, VOTE. Your favorite tool needs you.

RPG Programming Contests and a 'Free Stuff' Update

We've been talking to our friend Jim Buck recently about an RPG IV programming contest he is orchestrating at the upcoming AITP National Collegiate Conference. Jim is one of the biggest supporters of IBM i on the planet. He walks the talk. He is not only in charge of the IBM i curriculum at Gateway Technical College, but also finds the time to serve as President of the WMCPA User Group, which in addition to its regular monthly meetings runs an excellent annual conference at Lake Geneva, Wis., each spring. In fact we'll be presenting there in couple of weeks. Did we mention that he has also been a member of several IBM Certification test development panels? We worked with him on the RPG tests. We recall one time when his leg was in a cast during one memorable set of meetings in Las Vegas. Now that's dedication! Oh, and by the way, his graduates have an amazingly high placement rate. In fact we believe that he currently has more job placements available than graduates. Perhaps IBM could clone him and send his clones out to duplicate his programs at other schools! We're not sure how he manages to find the time, but he also teaches sailing during the summer--one day we're hoping to get a chance to sail with him. Jim does great work. If you ever bump into him, shake his hand and say, "Thanks."

Another of our friends, Aaron Bartell, is also involved in this project and has written bout his involvement in the project in his latest blog.

More Free Stuff

Back in late February Arpeggio Software announced it was making its ARP-ZIP product available at no cost to the IBM i community. We didn't mention it right away because Arpeggio said at the time that a version with AES encryption would shortly be available. "Shortly" arrived today. We haven't had a chance to test it yet but from the responses we've seen from folks who have tried it, it sounds promising. Free is always good!

Elsewhere on the free front, Lansa has announced version 1.1 of its LongReach product is now available. We've been playing with the 1.0 version and are impressed by its speed and ease of use. We're planning on upgrading to the new version before we do a full evaluation.

Similarly CNX announced version 3.0 of its Valence software. CNX will be demonstrating the company's latest and greatest at the upcoming RPG Summit in Fort Worth. We're looking forward to seeing it in action. If you can't make the Summit then look for CNX at local user group events. 

If you know of any other companies offering free community editions of their software please, let us know and we'll pas it on. We've seen how much of an impact tools like SugarCRM, Wordpress and other free software has had on the success of many IBM i shops. It's great to see traditional IBM i vendors moving in that direction. It can only be good for all of us.

Our Technical--and not so Technical--Reading List

This week we thought we would stray a little outside of the technical world and respond to one of the questions we are often asked. Actually it is more often phrased as a statement than purely as a question "You guys must read an incredible amount of stuff to keep up with all the new things in the IBM i world." This is often followed by "How do you decide what to read?" or "Do you ever read anything except technical stuff?"

Let's start with the technical stuff. We follow some dozen or more online forums ranging from Midrange.com to Code400 to those on SystemiNetwork. We also subscribe to more than 40 technical newsletters covering topic areas from Web design to mobile apps to general IBM i and (not surprisingly) programming in RPG, PHP, etc. Do we read all of these completely? No; there aren't that many hours in the day. We find that skimming the content often reveals trends that we should dig into more deeply.

Of course there are a few writers that we consider "must reads." Scott Klement is the first person to come to mind, followed by Aaron Bartell  and for PHP-oriented topics, Alan Seiden and Mike Pavlak. Trevor Perry is always worth reading; even if we don't always agree with him we have to admire his passion!

We have, of course, large heaps of technical books around the place--more recently the PHP, Web and mobile-related heaps have been growing. Actually since we buy more and more books in e-reader format these days the physical heaps aren't growing as much as they used to, thank goodness. Many of the recent additions to the library come from the folks at Sitepoint. In particular we've added "JQUERY: Novice to Ninja" and "Build Mobile Websites and Apps ..." both of which are excellent introductions to the topics and well priced, as are most of Sitepoint's offerings.

Do we ever read anything non-technical? Sure. In a blog post a few years ago, we talked about our fascination with "Predictably Irrational" and "Freakonomics." Susan has actually re-read "Predictably Irrational" since then and enjoyed it as much as the first time. She has also been enjoying some books by Malcolm Gladwell: "The Tipping Point" and "Outliers" and she has "What the Dog Saw" and "Blink" waiting in her "to be read soon" stack. We also want to re-read our friend Bob Tipton's great book "Jump!: Get Unstuck" before we see him at the upcoming RPG & DB2 Summit, where he'll be our keynote speaker. He might quiz us on the content!

What about reading purely for fun? Absolutely. We recently discovered Kathy Reichs and are thoroughly enjoying her books. We didn't know it when we started reading her, but her main character, Temperance Brennan, is also the main character in the TV series "Bones". But if you don't like "Bones" don't let it put you off trying the books; they are really quite different. "Bones" has just been TV-ized. We have also enjoyed most of the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child, which we began reading at the suggestion of friend and colleague Paul Tuohy.

Jon is a huge fan of Terry Pratchett and even persuaded Susan to read "Nation" which she enjoyed even though she's not into the fantasy genre. This is interestingly one of Pratchett's young reader series, which may say something about our maturity level. If you haven't read it give it a try. It will challenge the way you view religion and society as well as being a darned good read. Jon was glad he didn't realize it was for young people or he might have missed it!

Jon has just finished reading "Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories," which is a collection of the stories Randy tells on his weekly radio show. If you are a music lover this is a "must listen." Until recently you had to listen to the live stream or on satellite radio in the U.S., but past shows are now available on CBC's website. Next on his reading list is "Outwitting Squirrels" by Bill Adler Jr. ,which from a brief glance is hilarious--and hopefully helpful!

So what else should we be reading? Any and all suggestions welcome.

Legacy Code Can be a Legacy

Very often the term "legacy code" is used in a derogatory sense. The English definition of "legacy" normally has a positive connotation meaning "a gift that is left to future generations." We'll return to that thought later. However, when it is used in the IT community, legacy is often another way of saying "old, outdated, and useless"--at least that's invariably the perspective taken by some speakers/writers. Now admittedly they're often saying it because they have a "solution" to sell but. ...

There are many ways to look at legacy code though. First it's a living repository of the way we conduct our business. Very often it's the _only_ place within our organization where our business rules are recorded (Documentation? We don't need no stinking documentation; we've got code to write!). Our code base also represents a substantial investment in time and effort--often to the tune of millions of dollars. As such it should be viewed as an asset rather than a liability. But an asset only really has value if it can be utilized. While tools can perform business rule recovery (the two tools we know about are Databorough's X-Analysis family of tools and ARCAD's Observer) it seems to us that perhaps this is the biggest "gap" in the toolset that IBM offers to developers on the IBM i platform. Having RDP draw us pretty diagrams of our programs and applications is certainly useful, but being able to extract and repurpose our business rules is what we really need help with. What do you think? Is this the kind of tooling you'd like to see IBM offer?

For many IBM i shops, dealing with their legacy code is becoming an urgent requirement as more and more of us head toward retirement--the economy and our pension plans willing. For some companies this upcoming brain drain is becoming a major factor in considering a move to an alternative platform. Not that that's necessarily a solution either. Today's state-of-the-art application is tomorrow's legacy code after all. Witness the many "Is Java a Legacy Language?" articles on the web.

Personally we'd like to think that what we leave behind when we retire won't quickly be consigned to that negative legacy category. To help ensure that, we're trying harder to make sure we document what we do both internally and externally. We're trying harder to get clients to install appropriate tooling to help ensure maintenance is effective and accurate. And above all we're trying to ensure that we use modern programming practices when writing new programs to help ensure they can be readily repurposed. Indeed we're also trying to avoid the "just one more little fix" mentality and rewrite programs when appropriate. After all, rewriting may take a little longer than adding more chewing gum and bailer twine to an existing program, but it will reduce the time taken to perform any subsequent modifications.

Remember--today's masterpiece is tomorrow's legacy. Don't make the kind of mistake that Jon once made where inadequate documentation and poor error messages resulted in a gentleman in Hong Kong having to undertake a two-week search to track him down to discover the true meaning of the message "Oh xxxx - the xxxx thing has done it again!" 

Are IBM i Shops Cheap?

Several recent blog comments have highlighted something that we've often pondered ourselves. Why do so many members of the IBM i community seem to be so cheap?

Nathan Andelin commented along these lines in response to last week's post on RPG OA. Elsewhere Jon came upon the latest of many complaints from programmers bemoaning the fact that they can't persuade their management to buy into RDP**.

Often at conferences we come across programmers who have been tasked with writing utility X and are looking for direction. It's not uncommon that they have already spent many hours attempting to build something that a $1,000 tool could have had up and running weeks ago. Susan often fields questions regarding the "best practices" for creating ILE applications, only to have the questioners reject the guidance because their home-grown source-management facility can't cope with doing things the "right way." Now admittedly change-management tools cost a lot more than $1,000, but our experience indicates that most shops that use home-grown tools spend waaaaayyyyy more money maintaining them than they would have spent buying a commercial tool.

Perhaps more to the point, the folks tasked with doing such work are usually among the most senior (and therefore most expensive) staff. The same staff that could more usefully be building libraries of subprocedures for functions that are company specific for use by other staff, thereby making everyone in the shop more efficient. Or perhaps they could spend their extra time investigating new technologies that could make the whole operation more efficient.

But no. Many IBM i shops would rather repeatedly reinvent the wheel. Sadly it often seems to be these very same techies that perpetuate the "If it wasn't built here it is not worth having" mythology. Why do they do that? Personally we'd rather be exploring new stuff, not reworking the in-house email program for the 50th time.

Perhaps what's needed is for ISVs to include a "true cost" calculator on their websites? IBM Rational could take the lead with one for RDP. We'll give them a hand with a few basic calculations:

Salary of an RPG programmer: (say) $50,000 pa. Hopefully you are paid more than that (you're undoubtedly worth it) but we'll work with a low figure.

Additional costs--healthcare, accommodation, equipment, etc.: Normally a minimum of $50,000 pa.

How much more efficient could the programmer be if they used RDP? The lowest figure any user has ever given us is 15 percent and most claim 25 percent or more, but let's stay low and say 15 percent.

How much would it cost to achieve that 15 percent? Well to really make their work sing along let's add an additional 20-plus-inch monitor to their configuration. That's a combined total of about $1,000 for the RDP tool and the monitor. In other words the cost of acquisition is 1 percent of the annual cost of the programmer. Is there any other aspect of the company's activities where a guaranteed return of 15X wouldn't cause such a rush for the checkbook that the carpet would spontaneously burst into flames?  

If indeed Nathan's view is correct then perhaps RPG OA will never achieve its true potential because ISVs aren't going to build tools that nobody buys. That would be sad.

Does this match your experience? If not how did you achieve this nirvana? If so, what do you think can be done to change things? Please share your thoughts by commenting to this post.

** It's an interesting side note that despite the many complaints about IBM charging for RDP, it's a simple fact of life that uptake of the tool has been far greater since it had a price tag. Sadly the ones that suffer the most because of the cost are the early adopters for whom WDSC became a way of life and (assumedly) they now have no way to prove to their management how much more efficient they are when using the tool and therefore can't get the dollars for RDP.