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All The World’s a REPORT – from DO WHILE You Like It

Here’s a deep cut for ABAPers who are also Shakespeare fans. In a recent project chat room, we veered slightly off course into fun topics. One thing led to another…and we found ourselves re-writing Jaques’ famous soliloquy from As You Like It. Without further ado, we present “All The World’s a REPORT” from DO WHILE You Like It.

ABAPER: All the world's a REPORT,
And all the men and women merely PERFORMs;
They have their END-OF-SELECTIONs and their START-OF-SELECTIONs;
And one man in his time CALLs many FUNCTIONs,
His programs being seven transports. At first the WRITE, 
Mewling and puking in ST22’s arms;
And then the whining RAISE EXCEPTION, with his SY-MSGNO
And shining morning SY-MSGTY, creeping like snail
Unwilling to the application log. And then the CREATE OBJECT,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful CONSTRUCTOR
Made to his caller's local variables. Then a FUNCTION MODULE,
Full of strange EXPORTINGs, and remote-enabled like the pard,
Jealous in type-checking, sudden and quick in EXCEPTIONS,
Seeking the ST12 performance trace
Even in the short dump's mouth. And then the CLASS,
In fair round implementation with good attributes lin'd,
With TYPES severe and METHODS of formal parameter,
Full of wise saws and instance variables;
And so he executes his code. The sixth transport shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd MACRO,
With DEFINE on nose and END-OF-DEFINITION on side;
His youthful statements, well sav'd, a world too RIGHT-JUSTIFIED
For his shrunk stack; and his big manly RESULT,
Turning again toward childish OUTPUT, MOVEs
And RECEIVEs in his sound. Last transport of all,
That ends the strange version history,
Is second WRITEness and mere REDEFINITION;
Sans TRY, sans CATCH, sans ENDTRY, sans RETURN.



“All The World’s a REPORT” from DO WHILE You Like It.

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Paul Modderman loves creating things and sharing them. He has spoken at SAP TechEd, multiple ASUG regional events, ASUG Fall Focus, Google DevFest MN, Google ISV Days, and several webinars and SAP community gatherings. Paul's writing has been featured in SAP Professional Journal, on the SAPinsider blog, and the popular Mindset blog. He believes clear communication is just as important as code, but also has serious developer chops. His tech career has spanned web applications with technologies like .NET, Java, Python, and React to SAP soutions in ABAP, OData and SAPUI5. His work integrating Google, Fiori, and Android was featured at SAP SAPPHIRE. Paul was principal technical architect on Mindset's certified solutions CloudSimple and Analytics for BW. He's an SAP Developer Hero, honored in 2017. Paul is the author of two books: Mindset Perspectives: SAP Development Tips, Tricks, and Projects, and SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori: The Psychology of UX Design. His passion for innovative application architecture and tech evangelism shines through in everything he does.

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