My name is Rony G. Flatscher and I have been working as an IS professor at a European Business university (WU Vienna) who has acquired quite a bit of experience in teaching BA students programming for the past 35 years. Over the course of the years I taught e.g. COBOL, BASIC, Pascal, Open Access Programmer, C/C++, VBS (Visual Basic), VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), Java, and tested one semester REXX with a very surprising effect: the BA students can learn programming much faster in REXX than in any other programming language (including Python taught by colleagues)!
The secret lies in employing Object REXX for teaching as it includes structures/types and the powerful message paradigm in addition to all of the classic REXX capabilities. In a four hour lecture these BA students (some total newbies, some already with programming skills) learn REXX and then the object oriented concepts/features of Object REXX in a single semester (four months). In the middle of the semester (after two months), they not only are able to create simple programs in REXX and Object REXX, but taking advantage of the COM/OLE library on Windows that comes with the Windows version of Object REXX. This empowers them to interface/program the Windows shell and any Windows application with an OLE interface including all of MS Office using Object REXX only! It is impressive to see how quickly they become empowered to exploit MS Excel or MS Word for their needs with Object REXX! At the end of the semester (after another two months), using an Object REXX library that makes accessing Java possible from Object REXX, these very same BA (business administration) students have been empowered writing Object REXX programs to create GUIs (graphical user interface programs using awt, swing and later JavaFX), create client-server socket programs (including SSL/TLS), parse XML text files with SAX and DOM, interface/program Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice all with Object REXX only. And the best about this is, because of using Java class libraries from Object REXX, there is no need to a) learn the Java programming language oneself and b) all Object REXX programs run unchanged on Windows, Linux and MacOS including GUI Object REXX programs! To get so far in teaching programming skills at a Business university in a single semester (only a four hour lecture) has become possible with Object REXX, it would not be possible with any other programming language I know of for reasons, that have mostly to do with the "human oriented" philosophy of the REXX programming language (set forth by its father Mike F. Cowlishaw) which also has been an important guiding principle when IBM developed Object REXX. This translates into becoming able to quickly learn the programming language Object REXX which also means that it is a rather cheap (cost effective) to learn programming language compared to learning many other programming languages! IBM and the REXX Language assocation (https://www.rexxla.org) entered into successful negotiations to hand over the source code of the IBM product Object REXX and since about 15 years there is an "open object Rexx (ooRexx, oorexx)" interpreter with source code that has been constantly maintained, developed further and that gets released by RexxLA. There have been also IBM mainframe shops that have started to use ooRexx on mainframes in the meantime. The purpose of this message is to draw your attention to a great REXX programming language, originally developed by IBM, open sourced by RexxLA, and as a result available for all important operating systems. ooRexx can be a great "SAK" (swiss army knife) tool for any REXX programmer! (ooRexx can run rings around many other programming languages including Python.) But before being able to take advantage of ooRexx at all one needs to learn about its existence in the first place, hence this post. Here are two short articles which you might find helpful in this context (download link at the top left hand corner): - An introduction to REXX and ooRexx: Resurrecting REXX, Introducing Object Rexx (2006), <https://epub.wu.ac.at/8118/> - "Business Programming" – Critical Factors from Zero to Portable GUI Programming in Four Hours (2021), <https://epub.wu.ac.at/8425/> ---rony P.S.: It is not uncommon that students who use Linux start to replace their shell scripts with Rexx scripts as this is much easier and much more powerful after having learned Rexx/ooRexx. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
