On 1/12/21 1:55 am, Seymour J Metz wrote:
I just wish that they would acknowledge their abandoned child OREXX.
IBM certainly haven't abandoned ooRexx. It's my understanding that Rick
McGuire works on it almost full time. The mailing lists still get quite
a bit of traffic and the Github repo shows recent commit activity. If
you're referring the fact that ooRexx hasn't been ported to z/OS then
unfortunately I don't see IBM committing resources to a language in
decline. It makes much more sense to port modern languages like Go,
Python and runtimes like Node.js. Docker is going to be important for
z/OS and it's written in Go so it's a no-brainer. We've been beta
testing IBMs new clang LLVM z/OS port which is exciting in the fact that
LLVM can be used to build a plethora of different languages. I
particularly like Julia which has a similar syntax to Lua but can be
strongly typed and is compiled and bench-tests show it runs at near C
speeds.
As we are discussing z/OSMF and REXX I thought I would mention the Z
Open Editor plugin [1] for the VS Code editor. This includes the REXX
LSP plugin [2] written by Broadcom which supports auto-completion,
syntax checking as you type and symbol outlines. The COBOL and HLASM
plugins are even better. It uses the Zowe CLI [3] to interact with the
z/OSMF REST APIs for the Zowe System explorer [4]. It wasn't that long
ago that you would have to pay for the likes or RDz to get this
functionality but now it's free and uses cutting edge tools. The Zowe
CLI does not have a dependency on Zowe being installed on the back-end.
It's a client API and the only requirement is Node.js/NPM on your PC.
The salient point is that z/OSMF is not just for just for GUI
applications. The APIs are being used to build strategic eco-systems to
modernize z/OS for new hires that didn't grow up using TSO/ISPF.
Of course, this new tooling is mainly targeted at the new generation of
mainframers and not at folks who don't like learning curves. But there
is a lot of value to be had if you don't mind trying new things. The
Zowe explorer VS Code extension has 46K downloads so it's quite popular.
Although when you compare that to 46M for Python [5] you can appreciate
why IBM ported Python to z/OS :)
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=IBM.zopeneditor
[2]
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=broadcomMFD.lsp-for-rexx
[3] https://docs.zowe.org/stable/user-guide/install-overview
[4]
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Zowe.vscode-extension-for-zowe
[5] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-python.python
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