Re: Why program in MI?

On 7/21/2014 10:28 AM, John R. Smith, Jr. wrote:

> I'm a consultant.  I want to spend my learning time where
> it is going to pay off in a higher hourly rate.

That background helps me understand the question better.  Thank you.

> I am questioning the need to learn it because I have been an iSeries
> programmer since 1992 and in my 22 years of employee and consulting time on
> the machine, I have yet to meet anyone that programs in MI or at least no
> one that talks about it.  Since MI programmers seem to be that rare, I was
> trying to figure out why I would want to learn it as opposed to learning
> something else.  

I don't personally find it an either/or sort of dilemma; MI isn't that
hard to grok.

> Based on the comment "there are problems for which MI is a better fit than
> RPG", can you give me some specifics?

I am primarily an application programmer.  Green screen, printed report;
the dead centre of RPG's target demographic.  Occasionally though, I do
find myself writing tools.  I most recently used MI to solve a problem
proposed on the Midrange-L list: How to retrieve the object text from a
data area that was exclusively locked by another job?  I went through
the OIR and got the text from there.  Could I have used RPG?  Sure.
DMPSYSOBJ, CPYSPLF and RPG to parse the dump.  MI is the better fit.

If I were a consultant (I am not brave enough!) I probably would be
learning web programming as fast as I could.  MI is not a good fit for
that problem space.
  --buck

> -----Original Message-----
> From: C400-L [mailto:c400-l-bounces-Zwy7GipZuJhWk0Htik3J/[email protected]] On Behalf Of Buck Calabro
> Sent: Monday, July 21, 2014 10:08 AM
> To: c400-l-Zwy7GipZuJhWk0Htik3J/[email protected]
> Subject: Re: [C400-L] Why program in MI?
> 
> On 7/18/2014 9:11 PM, John Smith wrote:
>> I was wondering why I should learn to program in MI.  
> 
> I'm a simpleton, which exp,ains why I'm fascinated with these sorts of
> questions.  Why would you NOT learn to program in MI?
> 
>> Is there stuff
>> that can be done with MI that can't be done with RPGLE?
> 
> Can, can't, meh.
> There are problems for which MI is a better fit than RPG.
>   --buck
-- 
This is the Bare Metal Programming IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries) (C400-L) mailing list
To post a message email: C400-L-Zwy7GipZuJhWk0Htik3J/[email protected]
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/c400-l
or email: C400-L-request-Zwy7GipZuJhWk0Htik3J/[email protected]
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/c400-l.