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Rexx Is Still Strong After 25 years
therexxman writes "March marks the 25th anniversary of the Rexx programming language, and to celebrate the Rexx Language Association is hosting the 15th Annual Rexx Symposium at the IBM Research Labs in Boeblingen, Germany, from May 2 to 6, 2004.
Full details of the Symposium can be found in the 2004 Rexx Symposium Announcement.
Many of the world's 'Rexxperts' will be in attendance including Rexx's founder, Decimal Arithmetic guru, and IBM Fellow, Mike Cowlishaw."
Probably like most other mainframe languages, REXX is being used because when the programs were originally written, REXX was all there was- so rather than rewrite everything, REXX programmers just keep modifying the original code.
at least, back when i was using OS/2. When started with Linux, perl seemed very ugly and unintuitive to me (specially when comparing how text is parsed in both languages), but it was so easy to use the output of other programs (compared with REXX even under linux) that I finished to like it and using it for everything instead of REXX.
I think it's great that a language has survived so long. That being said.. although it has it's purposes, it'd be hard to say that it is "strong". It may be used. It may be actively developed. However, "strong" is probably an overstatement.
Yep. I wrote a full accounting package that filled in information in Professional Page and the Amiga Fax software in a completely integrated fashion. It was a complete office solution at a time when none existed at that a price small businesses could afford.
Order management, full accounting, catalog creation, quotes, etc...
I loved arexx.
Very easy to understand the syntax. The philosophy is 180 degrees different from Perl.
You had me until this statement. I have taught myself both Perl and REXX and I love them both but I would not say Perl is harder to understand then REXX. Perl has grown over the years to be much larger language with many more features then REXX and perhaps harder to get your arms around because of the extent of Perl.
Of course slashdotters have to rip on anything that wasn't written originally for linux or isn't open source. REXX was a great tool in its day. Shit, I would still use it over the vast majority of scripting languages today.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
I think, perhaps the real question you are asking is: are IBM mainframes at the forefront of modern computing, do they have a hidden impact the average Slashdot reader is unaware of. My guess is yes. I am not a mainframe guy myself, but it is my understanding that they are still very much used and very important with a fairly large worldwide market. Perhaps some of you REXX folks can give us some examples of the ways mainframes are still used? I'm too lazy to go look up IBM's sales figures for mainframes last year, but I'm guessing it is bigger than many people here realize.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
there are more powerful and yet less expensive solutions which should be hitting the market soon.
It is unreasonable to compare technologies which aren't even available yet to one that has existed, and been relied on for very serious applications, for decades.
Guess what's the language of choice for HPC? Why, FORTRAN of course. When Oracle wanted a scripting language, did they adapt shell script? No, they picked Ada, merged it with SQL to create PL/SQL. For serious computation or data processing, maturity matters more than buzzword-compliance.
To all you Unix bigots who want to call Rexx a dinosaur, you'd better take a good look in the mirror, because to the rest of the world, you don't look pretty.
Rexx dates from the the 1970's, just like the Unix shells. However, unlike them, Rexx is a modern language. Unlike the quirky, bizarre, and barbaric Unix shells that have continued to roam
the earth, threatening intelligent life, Rexx has reasonable facilities for modularization, name
space management, variable scoping, standard means of interfacing in both directions from C code, etc. With its ease of use, built in parsing, immediate access to command line functions, pipes, interprocess communication, etc. it was really in the same league as the
currently popular scripting languages and way ahead of its time.
Rexx was included in a number of operating systems and was part of IBM's effort to standardize all its platforms. Under OS/2, Rexx was the official standard scripting language and most significant programs actually did have Rexx interfaces. Once you knew Rexx (which was very easy to learn) you'd be able to script for pretty much anything. Plus, you had many third party libraries for networking, gui, etc., etc., and some very high quality visual IDE's. A very powerful combination.
This gave OS/2 a huge advantage over platforms like Windows and Unix, which have no standards in this direction. Under Windows, you have VB, which is powerful and extremely well supported, but proprietary to MS apps. There were a million independent scripting languages for specific Windows apps. Under Unix you had the shells, which are not powerful languages, not too suitable for embedding, and which are fragmented. Scripting under Unix thus became a rather dismal situation with either app-specific languages of very low quality (e.g. emacs lisp), or external scripting using command line switches or other uncompelling paradigm.
The situation now is that perl has replaced the shells for a lot of scripting and perl has the advantage of being a more reasonable language and has huge library support. However, perl still isn't a real embedded language and it's certainly not a standard for that. Under Gnome, Guile is "official" the standard scripting language, but in practice it's not used for that, even by Gnome apps.
As a former OS/2 user and a current Linux user, I have to conclude that, despite the emergence of perl and python, Linux has never caught up to the power of Rexx scripting. I can hobble by with a combination of shell scripting, perl, emacs lisp, and other glue, but it doesn't add up to the kind of power I used to have under OS/2.