I see nothing wrong with being emotionally attached to a programming language as long as you remain intellectually honest. IMHO, if you can't identify flaws in your preferred language then you don't understand it. If you can't recognize a task where, e.g., Perl, is a better tool than, e.g., OREXX, then you have a problem.
That cuts both ways. I hate, lathe and despise C, but I once defended it against what I considered unjust criticism. REXX has gotten better in your lifetime; IBM has failed to pick up some new features from ANSI and has abandoned new features from OREXX. The folks at RexxLA have language that TSO and CMS don't. Six languages doesn't strike me as a lot; I know more assemblers than that. My position is that the CS curriculum should stress learning multiple, radically different, langages rather than the language du jour. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of David Crayford [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, December 20, 2021 9:23 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Top 8 Reasons for using Python instead of REXX for z/OS On 20/12/21 8:42 pm, René Jansen wrote: > Yes, that is what NetRexx is for. TBH, I'm not interested in NetRexx. It suffers from the same weaknesses as classic REXX in that it only has one data type. The NetRexx manual has examples of dynamically calling a JavaScript engine to parse JSON which is totally lame. If I were to use a JVM language other than Java I would choose Kotlin which is strongly typed and has null safety baked in and cool features such as co-routines. REXX is impoverished and it's not going to get any better in my lifetime. Never get emotionally attached to a programming language. In my career I've programmed professionally in at least 6 languages and I would happily switch if a better one became available. Python has 47M downloads on the VS Code marketplace which is an indication of it's popularity and why IBM have invested in bringing it to z/OS. >> On 20 Dec 2021, at 04:37, David Crayford <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> There's a Python client library for Kafka but it would be a very heavy lift >> to implement a client on z/OS using REXX. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
