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Rexx Is Still Strong After 25 years

Posted by timothy on from the not-the-tiny-PDA dept.

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."

5 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Call me ignorant, but... by glen604 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. Rexx was great... by gmuslera · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Well.. by Rhesus+Piece · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Well.. by supersnail · · Score: 3, Insightful


      All depends how you look at it.

      Its the de-facto scripting language on the paltform that hosts two thirds of the fortune 500s data.

      --
      Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
  4. Re:My Input by sql*kitten · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.