As someone who spent serious time in RPG III in a previous lifetime, I would not advise anyone whose welfare I cared about or was responsible for to go look at RPG.
There is RPGII code I wrote back in the 80's that is still in daily use today. Most of the people who know I wrote the code have passed on, so the support calls have stopped.
Partway through that particular gig, the IBM CE came by and installed COBOL. (For many years, I had ranted about how much I hated COBOL.) So I transitioned all the RPG code to COBOL and what a relief.
So I had to eat a little crow.
Shortly after my gig, they went full scale IBM and built an IT department, as opposed to just a system 34 in accounting.
> As someone who spent serious time in RPG III in a previous lifetime, I would not advise anyone whose welfare I cared about or was responsible for to go look at RPG.
One of my first gigs was working for a manager who loved RPG III. To the point where I was tasked with making a data collection interpreter using the same constructs RPG III is well-known for.
To this day, whenever someone mentions "RPG III" and what that project entailed, I think of the other one[0].