It’s great to find peers who are equally interested in improving and evolving, not just as a programmer but also as a human being. I recently found one.

This post is addressed to the collective character that represents all the people who have told me that they like some things in the new 7.4 functional syntax but think that you shouldn’t overdo it and should avoid using REDUCE and all the other unnecessarily weird things because the code gets more obscure, it’s slower and they don’t see any advantages.

Are you serious?

In the last years of the previous century, an SAP project manager stubbornly opposed to upgrading the SAP system. Instead, he decided that all the SAP notes belonging to that upgrade were to be manually implemented. All 1000 of them.

This Tuesday I was invited by Renan Correa to participate in his podcast “Sem especificação”.

My dear friend Sérgio Fraga passed away.

Abapinho also belongs to him. Forever.

Thank you my friend for everything you were.

João studies Computer Science at his College where he learns Java, polymorphism, encapsulation and a lot of other programming techniques and best practices. When he graduates, he decides to join a company to work in SAP. At the introduction training which his new company offers, the first thing he learns is how to make a program in ABAP. Here’s how they teach it:

_“Go to transaction SE38, create program ZJOAO and then create includes ZJOAO_TOP, ZJOAO_FRM and ZJOAO_SEL. You declare all variables in _TOP, the selection screen you put in _SEL and all the FORMS must go into FRM. Then write START-OF-SELECTION and under that put all the SELECTs and finally write END-OF-SELECTION and there you show the results in an ALV. It’s that simple. Welcome to ABAP.”

Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do SY-DATUM.

I’m 6 years old!

(Thank you Caleb Prichard for the photo)

Go to the ABAP Editor (SE38) and check out line 323 of standard program RCIFCUST.

If you’re lazy, here it is:

SAP programmers are wild.

Thanks Brian Wolfe for the photo.

Greetings from Abapinho

Most of my friends, when they buy a new computer, worry a lot about CPU speed, disk speed and memory speed and whatnot speed. And then they go and buy a €6 mouse and a €7 keyboard. Ironic. While the CPU, the disk and the memory and all that other stuff often end up being wasted, the mouse and the keyboard are used to the max the entire time the computer is in use. I can’t count the number of times I’ve picked up someone else’s mouse and ended up having to whack it a few times to get to an icon, simply because the mouse is of poor quality or because the owner never bothered to get a suitable mouse pad. It doesn’t make sense. For someone like me, whose primary work tool is his or her computer, the way you interact with it should be as hassle-free as possible – it should make your work easier, not harder.