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Comment by vinkelhake | Hacker News Reader

While reading this, the old ARexx (Amiga Rexx) popped into my head. It was a scripting language that in itself wasn't very noteworthy. However, it also made it easy for applications to expose functionality through an ARexx port. And again, offering up an API itself isn't noteworthy either. But it shipped by default in the system and if an application wanted to open itself up for scripting, ARexx was the natural choice. As a result, a ton of applications did have ARexx ports and there was a level of universality that was way ahead of its time.

Come to think of it - I don't know what the modern equivalent would be. AppleScript?

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IBM was big on Rexx when OS/2 2.x was released in ~1993.

"IBM also once engaged in a technology transfer with Commodore, licensing Amiga technology for OS/2 2.0 and above, in exchange for the REXX scripting language. This means that OS/2 may have some code that was not written by IBM, which can therefore prevent the OS from being re-announced as open-sourced in the future. On the other hand, IBM donated Object REXX for Windows and OS/2 to the Open Object REXX project maintained by the REXX Language Association on SourceForge."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#Petitions_for_open_source

https://www.oorexx.org/status/index.rsp

I’m not reading thru all that, but believe me when I say the ground truth is that IBM developed REXX on its mainframes and a genius guy from that world (poor bstrd) recreated it on Amiga as a third-party product called ARexx that was, in turn, adopted and promoted by CBM Dev Relations. One of the things the fake frenching innovation team in charge of Apple for a few years did was go down in the basement where they had an Amiga in various forms of dissection and transplanted ARexx out of it, mixed with HyperCard’s vocab (which they also didn’t invent) and announced to the World their great invention: AppleScript. But I digress. Here in the (dystopian) Future, some Apple operating systems are just now gaining the kind of power that ARexx had, because these types of systems require the cooperation of the developers and they had little incentive to “donate” functions to the system just to gain integration with Siri/Shortcuts, but they can get fired/bankrupted for not doing it to integrate with Apple Intelligence (I know, I hate that identifier too). ARexx could not be ported to MacOS back in the day because it would have had to have been championed by Apple Developer Relations (Guy Kawasaki & Co —did I just wreck the “Hackers” movie reference?) and, even/especially in the 80s, they wouldn’t have approved a tech that “competed” with AppleScript. Microsoft didn’t jump on this because it descends from DEC tech (under the direction of the Cutler) which had nothing like REXX.

Microsoft introduced this in Windows in 1993, it's called COM and is still in (heavy) use today.

It basically powers all inter communication in Windows.

Not really. COM/OLE is a different paradigm, their answer to an infamous vaporware called Taligent/OpenDoc that bankrupted many developers. Microsoft was sort of stuck with that security nightmare though

COM is exactly what OP was talking about.

Apps can expose endpoints that can be listed, and external processes can call these endpoints.

"COM" by itself is a rather broad umbrella. What you're describing seems to be OLE Automation. That's the one that has type libraries (which you need for discoverability).

And then Active Scripting was supposed to be how you'd script those endpoints...

PowerShell with COM interfaces.

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