Migrating from PH to Java / RDBMS

[Mike Palandri]

At 07:23 AM 08/07/2000 -0700, Kesterson, Roger wrote:
>Your companies must have very large IS budgets...lucky you!  If they can
>afford to throw vast amounts of money at these projects, more power to them.
>Most of us are not fortunate enough to work for companies like that.
>
>One thing you seem to be forgetting, however, is the difference when hiring
>a programmer who has never seem PowerHouse vs. hiring one who has never seen
>Java.  If you can't find any PH programmers, you can train someone in a
>matter of days and they will be productive.  Try that with Java!

Wow.  A matter of days.   I don't believe I am unusually dense, however it took me a good year before I was proficient/productive in PH, and the better part of three years before I felt that I had reached a "journeyman" level of experitise.    (I also had the advantage of working next door to an experienced PH programmer who was kind enough to tolerate a never ending list of questions.)

Granted, an programmer experienced in other languages would quickly grasp the PH processing model and soon be able to write some of the simple reports, runs, and screens such as those presented in the beginning and intermediate PH classes.  However, over the years it has been my experience that the greatest challenge of any non-trivial PH programming effort requires figuring out how to make real world processing needs and data structures fit into the PH mold.  This can be a time consuming process and IMO, it takes tackling several such problems before you even develop a feel for how to get started.

It seems like it would be far longer than a "matter of days" before a new PH programmer could objectively called "productive."   (I suppose it all depends on what is being produced ;^) )




Mike