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Rexx for Everyone
An anonymous reader writes "It's easy to get lost in the world of 'little languages' -- quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual, or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM operating systems, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systems. Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages. Many Linux programmers and systems administrators would benefit from adding a Rexx implementation to their collection of go-to tools."
Useless? Sure, but it looked a lot cooler than your average progress bar, and I could poke my head into the room to see at a glance how far along I was on my hour-long 2MB download from Aminet (via a 28.8 modem).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
>> Its good to have diversity in your language choices, because different languages have different strengths and weaknesses, and having a good command of more than one can often make you much better, individually.
One issue is that rexx when compared to perl, pales in comparison. There are reasons for diversity with regard to differnt language styles, as each serves a niche, but you're kidding yourself if you think rexx serves any purpose for future scripting development.
There are reasons for python, perl, tk/tcl, C, C++, C#, java, lisp, and even smalltalk... but rexx? Lacking in the strengths of perl, and yet having more glaring weaknesses, with little in the way of development and integration that perl already has in a stronger and more up to date fashion.
Only reason to learn rexx is to help support previously written applications that would require too much time and effort to rewrite in a better support scripting language.
I owe a lot to REXX. I used to love REXX. Back when I was a co-op at IBM I spent two years doing nothing but REXX on VM/CMS (note to youngsters: it was an OS for the 370 family). It paid for my car and a trip to Europe. But more importantly it got me used to scripting languages. After learning REXX, it was a small step to Perl (version 4.036). Since I learned Perl, I've never looked back at REXX. I'd be amazed if REXX hadn't evolved once it got off of mainframes, but I really doubt if it can do anything that Perl can't. They are both in the same nitch, but Perl has one thing that REXX doesn't: Perl is more fun. When everything else is said and done, enjoying your time at work is a huge advantage.
Life is too short to waste on REXX. Stick to Perl have fun.
- doug
Yeah, I can see right away why I would want to write programs in this language. No object model. No regular expressions. Cobol-like syntax. This is more like BASIC (and not even the Visual variety) than Perl or Awk.
I know it may come off as such, but this really isn't meant as flamebait. I just really don't get why people would want to write new code in such a dreadful language.
(To be fair, I think the same of PL/SQL coders; but at least they have a good reason -- "Larry made me do it.")
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
My perception is that, these days, many people who use scripting languages tend to know two or three. One is generally bash/Perl/VBScript, and the other is a (for want of another term) "more modern" scripting language such as Python or Ruby.
bash and Perl are ideal for ripping together short scripts that do relatively simple things. The problem you often encounter with these languages is that it's hard to maintain scripts of more than a few hundred lines unless you're very disciplined in how you structure your code. VBScript on Windows sits in this area as well.
Python and Ruby fill the >100 line script niche by adding nice OO features. Python and Ruby scripts are generally easier to support than bash/Perl scripts once you get beyond a few hundred lines of code.
TCL seems to sit somewhere in the middle. I've never met anyone who actually uses it regularly, so I'm not really competent to slot it in anywhere...
Where does Rexx fit? Frankly, these days, it doesn't - these tools pretty much have the market cornered on both Windows and Unix platforms. New tools will emerge to split the "market" further, but to do that they'll offer some compelling extra feature to get people to switch. Rexx, being an existing solution, isn't likely to offer that compelling new feature.
The question Rexx advocates need to address is "Why would someone *switch* to my language?". In order to answer that, they need to be able to reasonably objectively discuss the pros and cons of Rexx vs. Perl/Python/bash/..., and I don't know of many Rexx people who can do that; they tend to know Rexx and nothing else in the scripting space.
Sure, but I was doing this on production systems in 1990. As I said, I'm not advocating REXX. However, it had a lot of really cool features that didn't seem to be in wide existence anywhere else at the time it came around. Python is much nicer than REXX, and I love it to the point that it's my primary development language, but REXX was alive and doing the same stuff (on a more primative level) nearly 15 years go. You have to give it some credit for that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?