[tubbs]

It's funny - I spend years as an SAP ABAP developer and the very day I start my new position apart from SAP, it's on the front page of HN.

ABAP will always hold a special, quirky little place in my heart. It's very powerful, but also totally frustrating. The language is a COBOL-like language made by Germans with a keyword graveyard as big as Berlin. The ABAP community (in my experience, online and offline) is totally unacademic: algorithmic complexity is a foreign concept, "code clarity" meant "hitting the Pretty Printer button every few years" (which was a nice feature), and there's no remote concept of best practices.

On the bright side, it makes for a good income, and the debugger is a gem.

[asc_jiji]

No, you got code clarity wrong. Code clarity in ABAP means using System Hungarian Notation and it baffles me that almost every ABAP programmer I talk to think it's not redudant to use a command such as READ TABLE on a variable called GT_VBAK(for non-abapers, G for global variable, T for table).

The only advantage that I see is that for the most part, every program will look almost the same regarding standard SAP tables.

[kk_cz]

FYI, this: https://github.com/SAP/styleguides/blob/master/clean-abap/Cl... exists and is slowly being adopted for new code. But everything takes time.

[Arwill]

At some clients you have to sign their development guidelines, and you have no choice but to use that notation. The rule at big enterprises is that new rules get added, but old, even archaic rules seldom get removed.

[npace12]

Congrats on your new position. Get ready for some debugger withdrawal. I haven't found anything better since :)

[panabee]

Interesting. Second comment about how awesome the debugger is. What could other debuggers learn from SAP's debugger?