A (strident) dissenting voice

It's dated 2010 - I think it got some airtime on PEG, and that's about it.

I'm not sure if this particular rant was raised on the PEG - something else this 'Abe Voelker' had written was discussed (Final Ode to OpenEdge Feb 15 2014 and earlier in July 2012). Despite the fact that he said he had moved on from OE and the ABL (obviously found something that he thought was better suited to himself) he responded on the PEG (Feb 2014) so he was still subscribed or saw that he was being discussed and subscribed to throw his 2c in.

I'm going to say he obviously spent quite a lot of time to write his blog :*)

As for me - 'I'm still drinking the Kool-Aid :*) ' Thanks Gus and the team for continuing to enhance and add to a great product.

Peter

There have been several exchanges on the PEG in which the gentleman in question participated.   I don't think any great insights were reached other than that the man really doesn't like ABL ... but for reasons which the rest of us found very unconvincing.

There's also a discussion on ProgressTalk (very short) where Mr Voelker presents his method of using Ruby to query an OpenEdge DB. www.progresstalk.com/.../ruby-adapter-for-openedge-databases-released.121299

never actually met the guy, but he looks like a bright youngster to me, some (if not most) of his comments are imho quite valid and he did took the time to update the post when his 'rant' did eventually lead to the 4gl being extended...

just to take his first entry about foreign-key relationship, does really everyone think this is unconvincing and we have to enforce through database triggers instead of being in the database metaschema? (model anyone)... come on, that should have been added way before table partitioning :)

I fully agree with Marian. A bright guy with valid points and no previous 'kool-aid' bias. A pity he moved on.

I share Marian's opinion too. Abe puts the finger on some sore spots in OpenEdge.

The language and database have come a long way, but there's still a lot to be improved...

there's no question that there's room for improvement. There's also no
question that Abe had a lot of ideas and is a bright cookie.

However,

1) going on a rant and calling the product a steaming pile of ***
often won't help the business case with PSC management. :)

2) As pointed out with Ruby, it wasn't entirely a fair comparison as
he leveraged rails and other libraries to say "look, progress can't do
this". Well, neither can ruby without those (free) libraries

3) Ruby is currently having some scalability and reliability issues,
so it's not the silver bullet that Abe was espousing.

I am always bitching and moaning about Progress and it's low-hanging
fruit. (Thomas may agree with this .. ;) ) but I have never forgotten
that progress has provided me with a continuous job for the last 25
years, and all that I have is because of progress.

Julian

On 27 March 2014 09:00, Lieven De Foor
wrote:
> RE: A (strident) dissenting voice
> Reply by Lieven De Foor
>
> I share Marian's opinion too. Abe puts the finger on some sore spots in
> OpenEdge.
>
> The language and database have come a long way, but there's still a lot to
> be improved...
>
> Stop receiving emails on this subject.
>
> Flag this post as spam/abuse.



--
Julian Lyndon-Smith
IT Director,
dot.r
http://www.dotr.com

"The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of
low price is forgotten"

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Hehehe, Julian... he didn't actually used the same wording as you ;)

As far as I can tell he wasn't looking to build a business case with PSC management, this is often not what a developer is interested in but it doesn't mean the management should ignore that 'pain'. The 'considered harmful' approach might be a bit harsh all right, although he does seems to be aware of it's not so productive outcome, but there might also be the age that play a role in the way we choose to express feelings :)

The fact that there is no real open-source library ecosystem is probably not (entirely) the fault of PSC, there are probably only  a hand full of those and in almost all cases there are give-aways more than community efforts... but, at the end of the day I don't care much if a particular functionality is implemented in the language itself or I can get it from a number of existing libraries right? We all (well most of us) like the 4gl for what it was (still is) but there should be more than just the language, not only the libraries ecosystem (look at it as the app store equivalent in mobile market) but also the tooling available to make the developer more productive.

It's just that I don't like dismissing opinions based on who expressed them, if we go to the facts and exclude Abe's personal feelings there are a lot of valuable feedback in his post that the management can't use to make the product better.  

Julian, this may be shocking for you - but I'm once more in full agreement with you...

You can't start a productive debate with Progress product management in such a way. Everybody that ever dealt with them knows that when you provide reasonable arguments they will listen and usually understand your needs. They can't promise everything - but as a matter of fact the product is evolving.

[mention:9e743c0abfdd482fa92b03421d35159d:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05], the whole open source library thing is a really interesting one. The trouble with ABL in my eyes is that nobody uses it in a non-business sense. Why would they? Licensing is too expensive to dabble in it. As a result anyone who works in ABL is doing so from a position of employment. Very few people would then dabble in their spare time. I've written a few useful tools in my time, and I use some much better ones that others have written. But they've all been written on company time. And it's certainly a feature of all my employment contracts here in the UK that anything written on company time is the intellectual property of the company I am working for and therefore I have no rights to distribute it myself.

Stop this. Now. Everyone will think that we've come to some sort of arrangement.. :-)

James, last time I've checked Java was still used mainly in a 'business sense' and that is not only due to Ellison take over :)

There are lots of technology provider companies that choose to help building that ecosystem around their own technology, I know there was a notable attempt to do that with possenet and Peter is doing a great job with `the factory` but things could be better :)

Do understand the restrictions on distributing work done on company time, however sometimes all we have to do is ask if some generic parts can be contributed to community and there could be a green light for that... let's see what Mips is going to release into the wild, Yonder and TVH did released some components of quarix framework on google code and just in case it could help someone else just got the approval from XPower to release a small wrapper built around zlib library for gzip compression/decompression (will look for a place to host the small utility).

I might note that John, Jurjen, and I hoped that OEHive would be the stimulus for that kind of sharing.  A lot has been shared there, but there is a lot that has not.