How I came to meet ABAP

I’ve been working as a software developer for 5 years now. During my career as a software developer, I had experience with many programming languages. I started as a C/C++ programmer(*), continued to Java and J2EE, and even had some experience with C#.
One day, not long ago, my manager announced that our project would require some programming in ABAP. He asked me to be one of the first developers that would make the transition to ABAP.
I was not overjoyed by the request, to say the least. ABAP seemed to me like an archaic programming language, a creature of the 80’s with an uncertain future. I had some experience with SAP systems written in ABAP, and I knew that almost all of SAP’s applications and systems were written in ABAP, but that’s pretty much everything I knew about the language. So I started to read more about ABAP.

Here are two surprising facts that I came to learn about ABAP:

1. The TIOBE Programming community index, in July 2009 ABAP was ranked in the 16th place in terms of popularity(**). Just for comparison, Java is ranked first, C# is ranked 6th, Pascal is ranked 15th, and Cobol is ranked 24th.
2. ABAP is an Object Oriented Language. To be more precise, ABAP has an extension which supports object oriented programming. Much like with C++, you can still write a mixture of procedural code and object-oriented code in ABAP. The concept of OO in ABAP is fairly new. It was introduced in 1999, along with R/3 release 4.6.

Anyway, I began programming in ABAP, and naturally I started to encounter some problems. I also bumped into some interesting material. As I do whenever I study a new subject, I kept some notes solutions to the problems I encountered and summaries of the topics I studied. Then I thought, why not turn these notes into a blog? If they could be useful to me, they would be useful to anyone starting to learn ABAP.
So here it is, my blog about ABAP. I invite you to join me on my journey exploring ABAP. I’ll try to share as many tips for the beginning ABAP developer as I can, and hopefully, with time, it’ll also contain some advanced topics.

(*) Yes, I know some people would be shocked from the fact that I’m even mentioning the two languages in the same sentence. But yes, there are some products out there that were written in a mixture of procedural C and Object Oriented C++. I got to work on one of them. Deal with it.

(**)
According to TIOBE, “the ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.”