With all due respect to the late Walt Kelly, this statement is possibly more
true of the AS/400 community than of the Cold War antagonists about which it was
originally written. We in the midrange community tend to be our own worst
enemies, to wit:
- IBM — Continues its lack of advertising, which is only overshadowed by
its inept attempts at the same on those rare occasions when it actually
DOES advertise. One can only assume that someone in the AS/400
advertising camp, which also drove OS/2 Warp into the ground, has compromising
pictures of Lou Gerstner which allow it to continue this travesty of a
marketing campaign ad infinitum until SOMEONE actually purchases a
machine based upon it. The latter is not going to happen, but if at first (or
second, or third, or fourth) you don’t succeed…And somebody please tell me why CA/Express requires that it be installed on
the host machine when Rumba and NetSoft require no such host installation for
full TCP/IP connectivity. - IBM’s Software Vendors — Those that haven’t tanked due to their deadly
embrace of UNIX compatibility continue to write software steeped in the
RPG/400 (OPM) model. ILE is used only when desired results cannot be achieved
via OPM, thus RPG programmers have no good examples by which to learn the new
methodology. JAVA? Ha! If vendors won’t use ILE, how do you expect them to use
JAVA? - The “Trades” — “Midrange Systems”, “News/400”, take your pick. These
publications, while occasionally touting PC-based solutions, get their bread
and butter from AS/400 COBOL or RPG programmers. They push the latest IBM
solution, even when it’s inferior to third party products, rarely suggest
third party products even when IBM has no equivalent, and mainly repackage
what IBM announces. They also rarely criticize IBM itself. “Preaching to the
converted” has become “Preaching ONLY to the converted.” All semblance
of impartiality is gone. - AS/400 Developers in General — Despite their now long existence, we
rarely utilize new techniques such as SQL, ILE, Database Triggers (which could
use some more definitive buffer calculations, BTW), or referential
constraints. Our own insistence on using “what we know” has certainly been
instrumental in the decline of the AS/400.
On the other hand, who can blame us? We all learned “C” only to never use it
again, and to my knowledge none of us is yet “flipping burgers” for not learning
JAVA.