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Comment by poo-yie | Hacker News Reader

Brief is an understatement!

For those who have never heard of Rexx, it was developed in either late 60s or early 70s at IBM. It is a powerful scripting language.

I first encountered it in OS/2 where it was the default (built-in) scripting language. During the OS/2 days a couple of GUI drag-and-drop app development products were built with it (Watcom's VX-REXX and VisPro Rexx). I used VX-REXX to create a graphical client/server application for OS/2 that used DB2/2. It was unbelievably productive. I've heard that VisPro Rexx was also just as good.

I also worked with Rexx in z/VM (and z/OS to much lesser extent). It was nice to know one powerful scripting language that could be used across various IBM systems.

There were a few odd things in the language -- 'stem' variables come to mind. This was Rexx's way of doing arrays (or dynamic lists). You stored the number of elements in $stem_var_name.0. Good times!

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I believe Rexx was also quite popular on the Amiga! That platform was otherwise very much the spiritual opposite of what IBM represented back in the 1980s.

Yup, it was called arexx but was really nice.

So nice that Commodore actually bought it off the developer and shipped it with later releases of AmigaOS. It's not just a great way to automate a lot of Amiga apps (since most, both commercial and "PD", had ARexx support) but also a useful IPC mechanism on the platform.

It was like another world what you could do with Arexx, because So. Many. Program. had support for it. Only what I started using Linux in 1995 one could do similar things (but in a much more clumsy and shell, pipes and commands-kind-if-way.)

I think PowerShell is the spiritual successor to Arexx. (Because you could do GUI stuff in ARexx and script GUI programs!)!

It is indeed very brief.

Something I've been wondering about lately is how much language developers get to code in their actual language. Perhaps if things get really really far along, the language interpreter/compiler/runtime/whatever becomes self-hosting. But I suspect many languages never actually get that far. I was just thinking about the fact that maybe most language developers today still code in C (I have no idea if this is actually true). Perhaps in the future they will code in Rust or Go.

He does briefly speak to part of this point:

> I don't think I'd change anything in them except to emphasise more that a programming language is a Human-Computer-Interface and the language designer should design for the users of the language, not just for himself or herself.

I personally have never used Rexx. But I remember many years ago I made an attempt to sign up for an OS/2 Warp beta and being shocked when I actually got picked. I recall installing it and the OS contained what was the first instance I had seen of some sort of voice control for computers. Even at the time my IBM PS/2 (a 386sx running at 20MHz) was at the low end of the requirements for OS/2 Warp and the system didn't perform very well at all. But I have a memory of speaking something like "Computer: Go to sleep!" and my brother laughing at me and repeating it from time-to-time after that, long after I'd uninstalled OS/2 and went back to Windows 3.11 or DOS or whatever I was running in those days.

One example is Rich Hickey who wrote Clojure, then his team wrote the Datomic database (on-prem and SaaS) in it.

Always liked Rexx. Worked at a fairly big IBM shop (mainframes, AIX, desktop, etc) were all Big Blue. Although Rexx was a bit cranky on AIX, almost all system level scripts used (or called) Rexx. It wasn't a world buster, but then I did't have any reasonable complaints about it.

It worked, was fairly easy to learn and teach, and didn't it's job.

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