The future of the various Rexx Language dialects (classic Rexx, ooRexx, NetRexx)

[Thomas.Schneider.Wien]

May I again *repeat* my personal opinion:

When we (you) do continue to *insist* to have REXXLA (and/or
ibm-netrexx) as a *closed* list,
I can predict you that the REXX language does:

1.) *NOT* get the attention it should get, it's marvelous.
2.) Same holds true for ooRexx
3.) Same will hold true for NetRexx, when it will become open source
sometimes in 2008 (as Rene's presentation promised!)

Let me tell you the background of this statement:

I did have a lot of meetings with local IMB representatives here in
Vienna, for other issues, in the past 4 months.

I did meet representatives from IBM COGNOS, IBM ILOG, etc, *and*

*None* of them did even *know* NetRexx, for instance, not to talk about
the existance of *OPEN OBJECT REXX*.

 From the messages I'm seeing here in this group, I see that many of us
are already *adult* ( a bit older)...

Now, when we do *NOT* make a decision to make an OPEN accesible Rexx
group, I do believe
that those languages will be dying (because they are NOT known well
enough in the public!) :-(

My current (personal) approach is to complete ReyC, the Rey Compiler, ....

........ but this is another story, as I am only 1 (ONE) man.... :-(

Sincerely,
Thomas Schneider
.... from nice Vienna, Austria, Europe.

www.thsitc.com
www.Rexx2Nrx.com
www.db-123.com

(end of advertisements)

Tom.



--
Thomas Schneider Projects ReyC & LOGOS on www.KENAI.com
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[rvjansen]

Thomas,

well, recent occurrences of openness aside, it has been discussed and the conclusion was that the closed nature of this particular list counts as an asset towards membership. There is an open list in the alt.lang.rexx newsgroup and it shows more often than not why the RexxLA list needs to be open to membership only. This NetRexx list is open to subscribers, of course.

I do agree that the year 2008 turned out to be particularly long, but we have an outlook for the open sourcing of NetRexx, and it looks good. Afterwards, we will push on with the Rexx I/O library, and will gain more open source software along the way.

I do share your worries, and as a start I am going over the current contents of the website (the invisible assets) and am deciding about how to make most of those visible to the general public. Do take into account that there are thousands of programming languages all in different phases in their lifecycle, and it will be hard to recreate the heigth in the hype cycle that Rexx had in 1995.

We all meet representatives of various companies and they all seem to be younger than we are and most seem to have never have done any programming. Within IBM, there seems to be a lot of knowledge of Rexx, but for some reason, they do not see this familiarity as enough reason to join an association that concerns the language - they see it more or less on the level of the Macro Assembler, which is also an excellent tool but they are not gripped by its specialness in the way that we are.

The thing is, if we all get one person more to join, the list would be twice as long.

best regards,

René Jansen.

On 14 aug 2010, at 05:05, Thomas Schneider wrote:

> May I again *repeat* my personal opinion:
>
> When we (you) do continue to *insist* to have REXXLA (and/or ibm-netrexx) as a *closed* list,
> I can predict you that the REXX language does:
>
> 1.) *NOT* get the attention it should get, it's marvelous.
> 2.) Same holds true for ooRexx
> 3.) Same will hold true for NetRexx, when it will become open source sometimes in 2008 (as Rene's presentation promised!)
>
> Let me tell you the background of this statement:
>
> I did have a lot of meetings with local IMB representatives here in Vienna, for other issues, in the past 4 months.
>
> I did meet representatives from IBM COGNOS, IBM ILOG, etc, *and*
>
> *None* of them did even *know* NetRexx, for instance, not to talk about the existance of *OPEN OBJECT REXX*.
>
> From the messages I'm seeing here in this group, I see that many of us are already *adult* ( a bit older)...
>
> Now, when we do *NOT* make a decision to make an OPEN accesible Rexx group, I do believe
> that those languages will be dying (because they are NOT known well enough in the public!) :-(
>
> My current (personal) approach is to complete ReyC, the Rey Compiler, ....
>
> ........ but this is another story, as I am only 1 (ONE) man.... :-(
>
> Sincerely,
> Thomas Schneider
> .... from nice Vienna, Austria, Europe.
>
> www.thsitc.com
> www.Rexx2Nrx.com
> www.db-123.com
>
> (end of advertisements)
>
> Tom.
>
>
>
> --
> Thomas Schneider Projects ReyC & LOGOS on www.KENAI.com
> _______________________________________________
> Ibm-netrexx mailing list
> [hidden email]
>

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