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From: Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: What killed Smalltalk could kill Python
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 21:59:48 -0500
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On Thu, 22 Jan 2015 10:55:27 +1100, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
declaimed the following:

>Not sure about that. Back in the 1990s, I wrote most of my code in
>REXX, either command-line or using a GUI toolkit like VX-REXX. Where's
>REXX today? Well, let's see. It's still the native-ish language of
>OS/2. Where's OS/2 today? Left behind. REXX has no Unicode support (it
>does, however, support DBCS - useful, no?), no inbuilt networking
>support (there are third-party TCP/IP socket libraries for OS/2 REXX,
>but I don't know that other REXX implementations have socket services;
>and that's just basic BSD sockets, no higher-level protocol handling
>at all), etc, etc. Sure, it's not technically dead... but is anyone
>developing the language further? I don't think so. Is new REXX code
>being written? Not a lot. Yet when OS/2 was more popular, REXX
>definitely had its installed base. It was the one obvious scripting
>language for any OS/2 program. Languages can definitely die, or at
>least be so left behind that they may as well be dead.
>

	To my mind, what killed REXX is that most operating systems just don't
support its key feature well: ADDRESS targets!

	When the only target turns ADDRESS into the equivalent of os.system()
(or some variant of popen() ) it just loses too much. Besides the original
mainframe implementation, I have a feeling only ARexx managed to maintain
the spirit of REXX -- and that may have been as it was so easy to extend
the native AmigaOS message passing IPC to create ARexx ports letting
processes truly communicate interactively.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/