What killed Smalltalk could kill Python

[Bob Martin]

in 734904 20150123 225104 Tim Daneliuk <tundra at tundraware.com> wrote:
>On 01/21/2015 05:55 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 10:37 AM, Tim Daneliuk <tundra at tundraware.com> wrote:
>>> I find these kinds of discussions sort of silly.  Once there is a critical
>>> mass of installed base, no language EVER dies.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> ChrisA
>>
>
>Rexx is still well used on mainframes.

http://www.oorexx.org/

I use ooRexx every day, on Linux mostly, but also available on Windows.