Shaking IT Up: ILE Is Not New Technology

by Kevin Vandever

Every time I play this game, someone includes ILE. This is a mystery to me that ranks up there with Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and why RPG programmers still use left-side indicators. Why do many iSeries professionals still view ILE as a new technology? Is there some deep-seated traumatic experience we all had as young programmers that causes us to block ILE out of our conscious minds? Is it only when we read about ILE or in the rare chance see it employed in some code that we release it from the depths of the subconscious and reintroduce it to ourselves as new material? Could it be an aversion to change or a fear of the unknown that causes us to keep ILE at a safe distance and thus lose track of how long it's been out there? Or do we really want to learn ILE and what it can do for our productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness and just can't get to it because we're lazy, overworked, or just plain deadline challenged? Are we so buried in our day-to-day duties that we lose all perspective of time and simply see ILE as new technology?

I've seen this time-perspective problem before in our industry, most frequently when we work many hours of overtime during a given week and then ask for comp time in return. We are often offered only a fraction of the hours we actually worked, if anything at all. But I digress.

Just know that there is precedent for messed-up time conversions, strange time continuums, and probably even some black holes in there somewhere. However, I don't really believe that time or the lack of respect for it is the complete cause of our bleeding-edge view of ILE. I go back to the aversion to change and fear of the unknown as potential causes. But maybe it's not that simple, either. It could be some traumatic experience early in a programmer's life, ILE or non-ILE related, but I don't have time to perform scientific experiments to prove it. So I'm trusting my empirical senses, and what I see is complicated psychological behavior. A cause and effect that combines all my suggested reasons into one hairy problem for the unsuspecting programmer.

The first cause of this misperception about ILE is yet unknown, but the effect is most definitely a fear of the unknown. This fear ferments in the subconscious and causes an aversion to change. This aversion to change is not only buried in the subconscious but, in really bad cases, can be as conscious as that bug in your program. In severe cases, I've seen programmers pronounce it as their mantra: "I don't like change!" Now, all this would be fairly simple to understand, if that's all there was to it. If programmers said things like "I don't like change, so I don't want to learn or use ILE" or "Gosh, I am afraid of ILE because I really don't know what it is," I could deal with that. I could even help. The problem is that irrational excuses are piled onto the phobias and are entrenched so deeply that they become truth. Stamping ILE as new technology helps to justify the excuses. Why say you're too busy to learn ILE, when you can lump it under the bleeding-edge-technology umbrella and say you're too busy to learn any new technology?

Let's take a look at how new ILE really is. It came out in 1994. That's right, 1994. It was part of the V3R1 release of OS/400. Since that release, we have seen V3R2, V4R1, V4R2, V4R3, V4R4, and V5R1 of OS/400. Some of the RPG enhancements that came out at the same time as V3R1 are already obsolete because of subsequent releases of RPG. If you view ILE as new technology, you must view Java as new technology, because it came out a year later than ILE. Consider how common Java has become. If you view ILE as new technology, you must also see Windows 95 as new technology, and if that's the case you must really be wowed by Windows 98. I won't even go into Windows NT, 2K, and XP, because I realize you probably haven't even heard of them yet. How many of you drive a 1994 car around? Too new? Still driving something from the 1980s? I won't even tell you how many wine bottles of 1994 vintage I've foolishly opened thinking they had aged enough.

OK, you probably get my point. My statements border on the ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than viewing ILE as new technology. There's got to be something more. Either my earlier views are close or we are simply lame.

And so it goes, year after year; we talk about ILE as a new technology. Soon it will be like the Rolling Stones or Neil Diamond, who have been around so long that a whole new generation of fans have discovered them. ILE, too, will be so old that new programmers, who weren't even born when ILE was introduced, will view it as brand-new technology. Then the cycle will start all over again. No, it's time that someone--me--says, "Stop!" We need to grab some shovels and start to remove the piles of irrational excuses. Then we can get to some of the phobias. We must treat those phobias with education, mentoring, and patience. Only then can we completely solve this problem and allow programmers to view ILE for what it is: simply technology. No new, bleeding, leading, or any other adjective that tries to make ILE what it's not. If none of that works, we've at least got to come up with another excuse for not learning ILE, because it ain't new anymore.