Actually I wrote the article, and was very surprised to see it here.
I'd love to hear your arguments so long as we are constructive.
Starting the whole discussion off though I would like to say, that the
article was not intended to be negative about Progress at all, over all
I think progress is a good language, and I am willing to concede the
idea that the flaws I see may be from the limited vantage point I have
so far.
Regarding difficulty level: From someone who has not used progress
before it is quite daunting, while sure it is easy to create the "hello
world" program... (took me about 10 minutes..?) Once you move to a
production environment you are talking about setting and more finely
configuring brokers, servers, databases, agents, app-servers, not to
mention the web server(s) and associated programs to get something of
substance really going, for someone who is just learning Progress that
is quite a learning curve. (Have you looked at the manual for setting up
and configuring the database options?) The language framework is quite
huge as well, just learning "which" command to achieve something is a
task in it self not to mention the myriad of options that come with each
command. Look in the appendix to the progress manual at the list of
reserved words, it is much larger than many of the other languages I'm
used to... So, while the language it self is not "hard", getting
something "substantial" that correctly leverages all the aspects of the
language is rather difficult for someone who hasn't been doing it for
years. Especially once you add production environment considerations
like security and performance.
Regarding IDE's... Switching to windows and using openedge architect may
solve all my issues, but I really hate having to switch my development
platform for one aspect of what I do when all my other web development
tools are in Linux (and some times Mac). I have (this week) setup a
windows Virtual Machine with OpenEdge Architect and will test it for the
next few weeks and see what I think, so I can give it a fair spin. I
was just very surprised that a programing language, that is written for
Linux and Windows, only had development tools that work in Windows. I
regularly use Eclipse for other languages (Linux/Mac/Win), but the
progress plugins seem to require it run from windows. (if I'm mistaken,
I'd gladly stand corrected.)
Regarding Debugging tools: I would love to see anything, right now all
I have seen is "message" statements and having to look through log
files. If there is something better, could you please point me in the
right direction so I can read up on it... I have a stack of manuals I
can read, just knowing where to look can be the hard part. I would be
thrilled to find better debug tools... (I'd love to be able to step
through the code, watch variable values, find the source of a variable,
set break points, or even trigger debug/error events...)
I would gladly edit my article if I could solve the issues I
presented.
I have taken an intro course to Progress, and am still learning, reading
and growing (and trying to keep an open mind about all of it).
Always willing to listen and participate in good discussion,
Matthew
On Tue, 2012-05-15 at 07:51 -0700, Richard Uchytil wrote:
> That is interesting. Reading that I found myself wanting to argue some points, saying it's not as hard as he said or that it does have good debugging tools. But then I stepped back and reminded myself it's not that he's wrong, it's that these were the impressions he took away after six months. SIX MONTHS, not six days! I'd hope Progress reads that because there are definitely some things they can do to make that impression better. At least he get it 4.5 out of 5 stars and said it can outperform the competition! Overall I'd say it was a positive review.
>