O'Reilly on the Virtues of Rexx

gaijincory writes "O'Reilly's ONLamp has written an interesting article on the history and virtues of Rexx, the first widely used scripting language concocted 25 years ago. According to the review, 'Rexx employs decimal rather than binary arithmetic' and 'You don't need to declare or predefine your variables. Rexx automatically allocates them when you first refer to them.' I'd be interested to hear about any success (or failure) implementation stories."

Comments

You asked for it

[Anonymous Coward]

We tried working with Rexx

An employee suggested to me that we load Rexx on a few machines here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it for our employee's day-to-day scripting. So I decided to let him install the interpreter onto 5 machines to see how the users got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using it on his system and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the client machines?

Once he'd got the machines up and running with Rexx we let the users try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: Rexx was a pretty good replacement for batch files and the users could still do their work as normal.

Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who could find things they were used to or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with batch files. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when Rexx suddenly had an error reading from our intranet file server and corrupted his project.

Needless to say, the Rexx team offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee uninstall Rexx from the machines and lets just say he's not with us anymore, because we had him killed.