What killed Smalltalk could kill Python

[Bob Martin]

in 734949 20150124 113420 Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
>On Saturday 24 January 2015 03:09:51 Bob Martin did opine
>And Gene did reply:
>> 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.
>
>Can it run typical AREXX source?  I don't see a single syllable on that
>now 5 year old site indicating any such capability.

AREXX is based on Mike Cowlishaw's original mainframe Rexx so I doubt there
was much difference.
ooRexx is compatible with Rexx and is actively maintained by current & past IBMers.
A new version is coming soon.

>
>Example: Something needs to be synchronized to occur in the first tick of
>the next minute, and has nothing to do until then, so it queries the
>system for the number of ticks remaining in this minute, then puts itself
>to sleep for that long.
>
>Is this possible in ooRexx?

Yes, you'll find all you need in the utility classes at
http://www.oorexx.org/docs/rexxref/book1.htm