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Ditto this. I was a ASP/VB-then-.Net developer 20 years ago and happened upon Progress 4GL when I had to create apps either communicating with or extracting da

Ditto this. I was a ASP/VB-then-.Net developer 20 years ago and happened upon Progress 4GL when I had to create apps either communicating with or extracting data from Progress sources. My only beef was the horrifically quirky ODBC driver (and the convoluted SQL Server DTS packages & openqueries that resulted) -- 4GL was rock solid on AIX, and also on CentOS/RHEL once we moved away from AS400... and this was for high volume factory execution systems at a global EMS firm. Around 2010, we started a migration from Progress --> PostgreSQL+Java, approximately when the majority of the original devs began retiring. It was painful and the resulting "new" versions of our apps & DBs were universally crappier, even if "easier" to develop for and manage using "agile" methods. I frequently miss the old days, when programming was WYSIWYG and everyone explicitly understood how computers worked.

PixyMisa 6y ago
My job for years was developing and supporting Progress applications mainly on AIX. So much less crap to deal with than is common today. Things actually worked.
- oasisbob 6y ago
  My experience with AIX as a sysadmin ca 2005 was dramatically different. Things "worked", but everything was OLD. CLI tools had bugs and warts that GNU figured out decades previously. I remember having to use obnoxious workarounds when tooling broke because 'find' wouldn't even work properly once you exceeded a certain number of files. (Several thousand, IIRC) And that curses-based wrapper for doing administration tasks... glad I forgot the name of it, to be honest.
  - mst 6y ago
    smitty! [[muffled screaming]]
  - PixyMisa 6y ago
    Ah. I was off AIX and onto Solaris, and then Linux, by 2005.
  - RichardCA 6y ago
    Getting Bash and the other GNU tools to run on AIX 3.2.5 was definitely a chore but I still miss those days. The culture was a lot more active in the 90's. I mean if you were trying to port something to AIX and having trouble with gcc, you could go on comp.unix.aix and IBM employees would actually respond and be helpful. We lost a lot when that era died.

PixyMisa 6y ago

My job for years was developing and supporting Progress applications mainly on AIX. So much less crap to deal with than is common today. Things actually worked.

oasisbob 6y ago
My experience with AIX as a sysadmin ca 2005 was dramatically different. Things "worked", but everything was OLD. CLI tools had bugs and warts that GNU figured out decades previously. I remember having to use obnoxious workarounds when tooling broke because 'find' wouldn't even work properly once you exceeded a certain number of files. (Several thousand, IIRC) And that curses-based wrapper for doing administration tasks... glad I forgot the name of it, to be honest.
- mst 6y ago
  smitty! [[muffled screaming]]
- PixyMisa 6y ago
  Ah. I was off AIX and onto Solaris, and then Linux, by 2005.
- RichardCA 6y ago
  Getting Bash and the other GNU tools to run on AIX 3.2.5 was definitely a chore but I still miss those days. The culture was a lot more active in the 90's. I mean if you were trying to port something to AIX and having trouble with gcc, you could go on comp.unix.aix and IBM employees would actually respond and be helpful. We lost a lot when that era died.