David Ashley wrote:
All -
This is a very interesting read.
http://weblog.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/10/13/42TC-dynamic-futures_1.html
I would like to start a discussion on where we go next so ooRexx can
play successfully in this kind of future.
Interesting article.
The author writes:
/Choosing the wrong language means filling your brains with semantic
cruft that must be paged out to make room for yet another way of
writing a loop.
/
This is the nervous adolescent paranoia of an inexperienced programmer.
The truth is that Forth, which I had not used for years
before a new microchip (24 parallel programming cores on one die) from
Chuck Moore arrived on my desk last week, and ObjectRexx,
which I have barely used professionally ever, are important lynchpins of
my praxis, as "Platonic /Ideals/", Forth of simplicity and directness,
and ORexx of beauty in an object-oriented string-handling language.
He also writes:
/The same credibility with programming hipsters, however, can scare
away the bulk of programmers and limit a language to a niche. /
ObjectRexx is a language that this fate /should/ have happened to, but
as it is, we would be /lucky/ to have niche to which we were limited!
The reality is that IBM's dreaming of OORexx turning a profit in the
1990's at a time when even Sun and Microsoft were realizing that
language compilers were no longer profitable doomed ObjectRexx to
near-insignificance.
ObjectRexx is cool because it's a very tidy string-handling language
conforming to an attractive theoretical model. Loving it since
1995 or so, I've only found one professional /use/ for it: testing Java.
I might have found others at The Phone Company back in 1999
if it had arrived on Solaris a little earlier and smoother (bugs bugs
bugs), see previous paragraph.
Ruby owns Web 2.0. Perl owns sys administration and CGI. *What does
ObjectRexx own?* That's the question.
I do like one of the author's points: The ECMAScript leap was too broad.
Like Perl 6.0 which has hung fire for, what, eight years!?
Whatever we do with ObjectRexx, let's not try to invent a new system. It
is what it is, let's keep it that way.
--
Jack J. Woehr # "Self-delusion is
http://www.well.com/~jax # half the battle!"
http://www.softwoehr.com # - Zippy the Pinhead
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