Oh, the horror
I downloaded ASNA Visual RPG a whilst ago, before they had the dot.not thing ready and played with for all of 15 minutes. Didn't think it true enuf to RPG for the hardcore faithful. Lot's of RPG won't work because it doesn't support the plethora of cards available on RPG/400. Makes for a weird mixture of VB and RPG that I can't quite stomach.
If I were to say something positive about RPG, it would be along the lines of how well it integrates with the AS/400 concept of a database. And how it also makes for a good tool for green screens. And finally how easy it is to break an application down into hundreds, or even thousands, of independent programs. Take away those three goodies (like VRPG does) and all you are left with is the bad things.
Of course, the real horror of RPG is that it's been updated many times, but never managed to deprecate some of the old cycle leftovers. Pretty simple why they didn't jettison the stuff - a lot of programs still written in this stuff. And given that many AS/400 applications are thousands of programs deep, most still have scattered programs that use RPG-II and RPG-III logic.
I find it strange that ASNA has hooked up with .Net. For sure, integrating different languages with the CLR is easier than with the JVM. But the AS/400 world is JVM - given IBM's penchant for Java. I can't see that .Net will appeal to these partisans.
