We are betting that with this development architecture, almost any developer will be able to pick it up and work on it.
This reduces the fear we have of a diminishing pool of talent in RPG, and gives us comfort that we are not working in a “dead” language.

In the meantime, we’ve come full swing from the old days of
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“Enter Code:______” (if you don’t know it, you don’t move on.) Oh, and by the way, we wanted a numeric value and you typed a non-numeric value, so a small blinking number will appear on the bottom left of your screen which will completely block your keyboard until you press the “Error Reset” key, which of course everybody understands and it’s only common sense that you should press the key to mean “Error Reset” (assuming that is how your keyboard mapping has been set up.

Now
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Search:________________________ (type anything you can think of and we’ll find it a la Google.) Thanks to the power of dynamic string manipulation with varchars in FREE, which can be used to build dynamic SQL statements which join many different files (tables), and can search all of them at once, in just a day of programming you can build whole new search functions.

As you can see, I can barely restrain myself.

I would be surprised if young talent, trained in java and .NET wouldn’t enjoy developing in FREE with SQL and I expect they would pick it up very quickly.

(p.s. It has come to my attention that at some point in V5R3 and backwards, you could not use SQL in FREE. For any of you that are trapped in that environment, I strongly suggest upgrading to at least V5R4, and then you can be truly “free”. )