Bob Cancilla on IBM i › RPG Programmers a Vanishing Breed
March 9th, 2013
I wanted to get an objective handle on the future of IBM i and RPG language. I have been telling folks that it is time to move away from RPG or put your business at risk and of course the RPG folks are saying NO ITS NOT TRUE!
The reality is that the RPG programming language represents a usage of less than 2% of all of the program code written and the population of people with skills to write RPG are equally narrow.
Here are some statistics to back this up:
Tiobe Software Programming Community Index February 2013 - RPG 0.247% of all languages
The Transparent Language Popularity Index - March 2013 — RPG .175% of all languages
PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language Index — RPG NOT LISTED
Programming Language Trends - O’Rielly — RPG NOT LISTED
ComputerWeekely.com job listings RPG NOT LISTED
Note: COBOL is rated at .515% by Tiobe which is 5 X that of RPG!
The most popular languages are:
The message here should be crystal clear! If you are using RPG based systems you need to replace or convert them quickly. You have two big points of risk:
1. a lack of RPG programmers in the market place with skills to maintain your systems,
2. the probability that IBM will withdraw support in the near future and you will have no support.
The reality is that the RPG programming language represents a usage of less than 2% of all of the program code written and the population of people with skills to write RPG are equally narrow.
Here are some statistics to back this up:
Tiobe Software Programming Community Index February 2013 - RPG 0.247% of all languages
The Transparent Language Popularity Index - March 2013 — RPG .175% of all languages
PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language Index — RPG NOT LISTED
Programming Language Trends - O’Rielly — RPG NOT LISTED
ComputerWeekely.com job listings RPG NOT LISTED
Note: COBOL is rated at .515% by Tiobe which is 5 X that of RPG!
The most popular languages are:
| Language | Data Sources | |||
| TIOBE | The Transparent | PYPL | Job's | |
| JAVA | 18.387% | 17.717% | 27.100% | 20.653% |
| C | 17.080% | 17.391% | 8.300% | 1.654% |
| Objective-C | 9.803% | 10.426% | 6.100% | 15.352% |
| C++ | 8.758% | 5.885% | 9.400% | 3.053% |
| C# | 6.680% | 4.708% | 9.500% | 6.361% |
| PHP | 5.074% | 4.583% | 14.400% | 22.434% |
| Python | 4.949% | 4.059% | 9.600% | 4.071% |
| Visual Basic | 4.648% | 6.605% | 3.600% | |
| Perl | 2.252% | 2.158% | ||
| Ruby | 1.752% | 1.954% | 2.700% | 8.736% |
| JavaScript | 1.423% | 1.271% | 8.227% | |
The message here should be crystal clear! If you are using RPG based systems you need to replace or convert them quickly. You have two big points of risk:
1. a lack of RPG programmers in the market place with skills to maintain your systems,
2. the probability that IBM will withdraw support in the near future and you will have no support.
Read the original at Bob Cancilla on IBM i.
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