What killed Smalltalk could kill Python

[Tim Daneliuk]

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.
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Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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