What killed Smalltalk could kill Python

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 21 January 2015 23:46:09 Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski did opine
And Gene did reply:
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 10:55:27AM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > Where's REXX today?
> 
> Still (somehow) alive in neo-Amiga platforms like AmigaOS4.x, MorphOS
> and AROS. I know that's as good as dead but there are still people
> writing AREXX glue code.

He asked about REXX, not AREXX. There is no comparison between the two as 
AREXX was a huge superset of REXX.

I have co-written some rather widely distributed amiga code in AREXX, then 
compiled it to standalone with RexxPlus.

When I switched platforms to linux in 1998, the first thing I did was to 
go find an AREXX for linux.  But had to settle for IBM's REXX/Regina, 
which wasn't capable of running any of our AREXX code.  AREXX hooked into 
the OS and there wasn't anything I ever wanted to do that could not be 
done in AREXX.

REXX/Regina is an extremely emasculated language that has zero connection 
into the os, and I found it completely useless when compared to AREXX.

If, when anyone here was using an amiga, and was using EzCron to schedule 
stuff, Jim Hines and I wrote it as there was no such scheduler for 
amigados.  Everything else we laid our hands on killed time by 
busywaiting, killing the machines performance. EzCron put itself to sleep 
intelligently by asking what time it was, and then sleeping until the 
first second of the next minute. That we published at the time, and then 
built on that for EzHome, which was a dumber version of what we call heyu 
today.

Trivia bit: William Hawes, who wrote AREXX and sold it thru the commode 
door sales channels, was never paid a dime for his work. But those 2 guys 
screwed everybody. He had an account on kernel.org in 1998, might still 
have, but it was empty then and the last time I looked, probably 5 years 
ago.

So I have no clue what a very talented programmer is doing for a living 
today. To me, that sad as hell.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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