I looked at your list and I am happy to see that these include the things you find important. JS is undeniably a big factor but “the good parts” is a thin booklet. As is groovy - slow and nevery had any appeal to me, just looks messy. I quite like Ruby as an idea but slow as molasses.
Today I looked at Lua, and although quite elegant, small and snappy, I am really disappointed that this is one of those languages that gives you wrong answers for numeric problems and having unicode support in a utf8 library that is different from the string functions - that is just funny. I am not implying that all Rexx implementations shine in this regard, but that is just neglect. NetRexx does, however, as it does in unlimited decimal precision arithmetic. Of course NetRexx can use the Java stream API for functional programming. That remark is just as odd as ‘it only has one type’. The fact that it is from 1995 and can use features that only appeared in Java 8 - personally I find that telling about the quality of the design. But I am not telling you that you need to like it - like the way we are told that we now need to like Python more than Rexx, while it cannot do what we need to do - for all the wrong reasons. Looking at your list of requirements I think Scheme had it quite covered. Some of them are gimmicky and some seem useful. None of them address the core qualities of the mainframe, which are Channels, packed decimal, DB2, CICS and COBOL (as long as you forbid dynamic memory). I think the discussion has strayed too much from what sparked it, which is a hitpiece with 8 untruths about Python and Rexx. Yes we like all languages to be available, and well maintained on z/OS. Please provide interfaces and precompilers for the main infrastructure. It is remarkably odd that IBM does not invest in the things that made the platform what it is, but it is not my problem. If the message is that the mainframe now can run the same software as the Raspberry Pi or your generic AWS instance, so be it. I think you will find that other people are emotionally attached to their tools and programming languages, it is a human thing. Also, I found that not all people can easily switch between a large number of ever-changing programming languages; which is meant as a compliment to you; but nevertheless very true. So I thank you all for a very interesting discussion. Best regards, René. > On 7 Jan 2022, at 20:53, David Crayford <dcrayf...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I could go on. Even Java supports functional programming since Java 1.8 and > which introduced the streams API. It's unusual to see and old school loop in > modern Java code. Even C++ has lambda's. > > I missed "closures" on my list which code hand in hand with "functions as > first class objects". Very powerful, for example in Kotlin you can easily > create type safe builders (DSLs) > https://kotlinlang.org/docs/type-safe-builders.html. > That's why I have absolutely no interest in NetRexx. I have far better > options on the JVM. I don't get emotionally attached to programming > languages. If a better one becomes available I will quite happily switch as I > have done ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
