[TriLUG] Money in mysql

Chris Calloway cbc at unc.edu
Thu Oct 14 14:50:02 EDT 2004


Rick DeNatale wrote:
> I have to admit than when I read the announcement about IBM turning
> Rexx over to the open source community, I wondered if this really
> meant that Mike C was retiring. <G>  Mike's another guy who has been
> at IBM for a long time.

Mike Colishaw has been with IBM for 32 years.

I think more recently (last ten years) Mike Colishaw, author of classic
Rexx, has been more associated inside IBM with the NetRexx dialect.
NetRexx development comes out of IBM's Hursley Labs. It leverages Java
classes similar to Jython. It's freely downloadable. It is not open
source and is covered by the IBM Employee Written Software License.

ObjectRexx, the product just open sourced, is another dialect (IBM often
competes with itself). ObjectRexx comes out of IBM's Böblingen Labs. It
was packaged with OS2 (you had to tell OS2 to turn it on to substitute
the built-in classic Rexx interpreter). The AIX version is still
available but is three years past end of support. It also comes in
Windows (became available in May), Linux, and Solaris flavors.

So although Mike is surely old enough to retire, I don't think the one
event signals the other. The guy is a giant among programmers. He
brought Java to IBM, standardized ECMAScript, and got decimal math added
to IEEE 754, C, and Java. We should all aspire to retire with a resume
that phat.

IBM also markets Rexx for zSeries, VSE, and CICS. There are many non-IBM
versions. There's already been an open source cross platform version of
Rexx for years called Regina. Microsoft even packaged it in the NT
Resource Kit for awhile. Regina is an ANSI Rexx implementation. 
ObjectRexx has object extensions.

I wrote my first Rexx progam in 1984 on VM/CMS. It was like nirvana. Who
knew programming on the mainframe could be so quick and easy? I wrote my
last Rexx program in 1996 in ObjectRexx on OS2. ObjectRexx was OK for
people who already knew Rexx. It shouldn't be your first choice for OO
scripting. The choice for using it was that is was already built into 
OS2. I could deliver an ObjectRexx program to OS2 customers and neither 
they nor I would need no extra distribution or runtime licenses or 
installs. The idea was that every IBM delivered OS should have Rexx 
pre-installed. There are much better scripting languages now. But for at 
least a decade, Rexx was way cool, and there are still small mountains 
of code that run on it.

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway
http://www.seacoos.org
office: 17-6 Venable Hall   phone: (919) 962-4323
mail: CB #3056, 12 Howell Hall, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC 27599





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