Re: RE: Skills required for New Era development

>>1) Does having previous Informix 4GL experience help or hurt a prospective >>New Era programmer? It helps a lot, because you've already had experience with Informix, relational databases in general, and the programming language itself. The structured language in NewEra is identical to 4GL. However, do not be lulled into believing that you don't need training. Object-Oriented/Graphical programming is a LOT different from character/structured. It will be a couple of months at least before you get comfortable with the NewEra language. If you have had no experience with graphical development, then you will need to deal with some new things, like event-driven programming and the various issues regarding Windows development. You also need to access the programming skills of each developer. Some people want to learn new things; others resist it. People who don't want to learn something new are not candidates for good OO developers. (nor can they expect to have much of a career in this business) >>2) Does each memeber of the development team need to have strong C++ >>skills? No. A nice aspect of NewEra is that you can transition from structured programming to OO programming with a language that is easier to understand than C++. A C++ developer will already know OO programming (you hope), so the transition to NewEra will be smoother. A C++ developer may like NewEra because you don't need as much code to do the same things. But C++ is certainly not required. I tried to learn C++ but was not successful. OO programming is not that difficult once you learn it, but it is very difficult to learn with a cryptic language like C++. Now that I know NewEra, I understand C++ much better. >>3) Does each member of the team need to have strong OOD and OOP skills? No, but they must be willing to learn them. Having one experienced OO person to train the other people on your staff might be helpful. Classes on OO design are also helpful. You can develop a NewEra application without using OO design, (you can simply do things like "CALL function()" like you do in other languages) but you will not be using the tool to its full advantage. >>>4) With respect to previous questions, could a New Era development team be >>made up of a mix of 4GL programmers and C++ programmers, with the C++ >>programmers contributing the OOD and OOP skills. Yes, this is a good mix for a NewEra development team. I will say that you need a mix of theory-oriented developers and people who deliver real applications. You can get bogged down in OO theory. You need someone who can deliver production applications. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Randall Rhea Systems Engineer Informix Software randall@informix.com