/me remembers back in the late 80's when I was a lad, RPGII was this fantastically exciting thing I learned spending hours and hours and hours reading manuals and staring at these weird HUGE sheets of printed green lined paper with seemingly meaningless code typed on them with dodgy faded dot-matrix printouts.

/me spent many a lunch-hour playing with a huge metal ruler with all kinds of RPG2 column based stuff on it so I could figure out which indicator was where, on the aforementioned dodgy faded dot-matrix printouts.

/me wonders how, two decades later (wow - am I really that old?), this thing called the internet has appeared and yet I still manage to answer questions posted by people that are intelligent enough to find/subscribe and post a question to a forum but are seemingly unable to type the same thing into any of the myriad of search engines - or 'decision engines' if you're a real pointy head, or work at Microsoft.

/me wonders how IBM didn’t manage to properly advertise the power of the AS400 (or whatever name it is this week) and this beautiful and elegant RPG language

/me wonders how much longer I will have a career in the AS400 game, writing RPG and generally tinkering with IT stuff. I frequently use the quote "its not my job I just get paid to do my hobby!"

/me wonders if I am just getting old, bitter, twisted and annoyed by the lazy mental attitude of some programmers - old and new (lazy programmers make real bad programmers)

/me still describes his job role as 'programmer' not 'information technology architect' or 'Chief Information Executive Developer' ;)

/me decides to stop using this /me thing cause it's really confusing slash me….

Twenty Years later and the language has evolved almost beyond recognition from those early days. RPG/Free Format is so much improved over the old column based RPGx versions I frequently find it difficult to contain my excitement. My wife has suffered my occasional dinner-time diatribe about this new %BIF technique that I'm using that's really cool and sexy… when her eyes glaze over I know it's time to invoke an internal EVAL GEEK_MODE = *OFF ;)

Now, if I'm coding and need to check some particular OPCODE the answer is a simple click/click/Google away. I cant remember the last time I opened a big fat manual and chuckled for the 9,342nd time at the this-page-is-intentionally-left-blank pages.

Is the answer to technical questions easier to find? Yes
Is the answer to technical questions easier to understand? Probably
Are lazy coders diluting the pool of sharp RPG programmers and bringing the good guys and this excellent machine into disrepute Definitely
Is outsourcing programming requirements to offshore sweat-shops a plan for effective, bug-free e-business code? Absolutely Not

So, in this modern world being a programmer is no longer an elite, unusual or clever jobtitle.

• Everyone programs.
• Everyone can write code.
• But not everyone is a programmer. ;)