ABAP_to_the_Future

We’ve got twenty-first-century technology and speed colliding head on
with twentieth- and nineteenth-century institutions, rules, and cultures.
—Amory Lovins, A 40-Year Plan for Energy (Ted Talks)
16 Conclusion
In a paraphrase of a famous saying, back in 2001 Shai Agassi promised to “kill all
ABAP programmers.” I don’t think he meant itliterally, but at that point it looked
like Java was going to be king. There wa s even talk of running some automated
process to transform the entire SAP ABAP code base to Java (I think that was a little
optimistic).
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we can see that this did not happen; SAP
programmers still use ABAP the vast majorityof the time (and Agassi’s electric car
company did not do too well either). Instead, as we have seen throughout this
book, SAP has been throwing an enormous amount of effort into improving the
ABAP language with new features and adding whole new chunks of technology,
like BRFplus and BOPF.
The killer argument that ABAP is future-proof is the fact that it can be used to take
advantage of SAP’s new poster child, SA P HANA. When a lot of ABAP programmers
realize this, they breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Thank goodness for that!
My job is safe, and everything is business as usual.” Well it’s not, and there are
two reasons for this.
If you only stick to the technology that was around the year you started programming
in SAP—such as DYNPRO programs , SAPscript, and ALV reports (I have
even seen development departments in which they still favor WRITE statements)—
and don’t even consider “weird,” “new” things (such as object-oriented programming
and assorted new technologies, like the ones showcased in this book), then
you are committing professional suicide.
People born today (and, indeed, the pe ople entering the workforce right now)
don’t tolerate ugly gray screens and ye ars between new versions of programs.
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