RPG expert Paul Tuohy says the longtime programming language — whose history dates back to the days of punchcards — is anything but ancient and insists that IBM won’t let it die off.

But there are problems, he said. One of them is backward compatibility. What? Being able to run an RPG program from 30 years ago on today’s System i machine without having to recompile is a problem? Well, yes. Because it works, people are slow to adopt change, and are therefore not taking advantage of the new developments IBM has done with RPG.

Tuohy added that newer technologies like Java should be working in concert with RPG on the System i, not as a replacement. Tuohy suggests using Java to tweak the interface but keeping RPG to handle all the business logic, which he said it’s so good at.