IBM i Modernization – Life After RPG

March 30, 2022 Jose Caso Jacobs

How an IBM i business approaches legacy application modernization doesn’t differ from application modernization on any other platform. Well, there is one slight difference. Many of those IBM i businesses have the added weight of replacing working legacy applications for the simple fact that RPG fell out of mainstream coding decades ago. The code is efficient and perfectly runs mission-critical apps, but there are fewer and fewer programmers around to maintain that code.

Colleges and universities stopped teaching RPG before Y2K was even a concern. Developers that learned RPG in the 1980s and early 1990s were 30 or 40 years …