Blast from the past goes open
http://www.rexxla.org/Newsletter/oorexx-pr.html
IBM released Object Rexx under the Common Public License.
Thank God for Dr. Dobb’s Journal to keep me up to date on my first programming love. We’ve gone our separate ways, but I still hold Rexx close to my heart and wish it only the best.
Hey, what’s up with the job?
Hey, what’s up with the job?
Beats me. I just figure I
Beats me. I just figure I need to get a new job before I get laid off from this one.
Too bad you’re “involved“
Too bad you’re “involved” (Well, from my perspective. LOL) We could move to Portland. Great housing prospects there right now.
Good luck with the job. That has to be very stressful.
Flashback!
1991,
Flashback!
1991, Williams-Sonoma. 150 IBM PS/2 model 80s in stores running OS/2 1.2, dialing in through analog dialup, X.25, or leased line to a model 80 running OS/2 and Excellenet WAN software.
We wrote all of the midnight batch processing in REXX. We became I after my boss sent a typo out to all 150 stores and we had to have store managers edit a batch file with Edlin. 🙂
Oddly enough, I got some schwag from one of the OS/2 trade shows that year; a Uniball Micro pen with the OS/2 logo on it. It still writes!
OS/2 kept re-appearing over the years. Octel uses OS/2 for their small business voicemail system.
Involved? No, “involved” I
Involved? No, “involved” I ain’t. Would be nice, tho.
I’ve thought about Portland before. Seems like a nice town. If‘s old landlord hadn’t been so opposed to cats, I might be living there now. But I don’t really want to leave the Bay Area, and I’m not convinced that my job prospects would be any better in Portland.
Thank God for Dr. Dobb’s
Thank God for Dr. Dobb’s Journal
I’m here to serve, sir.
Hey, so how’s the Newton piece coming?
edlin? edlin???
I know that
edlin? edlin???
I know that EPM diddn’t come around until OS/2 2.0 (or 2.1?) but didn’t you at least have E on those boxes? Eeek!
But yeah, Rexx was real good for the kind of thing you described, although it might not have matured (or the platform and applications might not have) at the time you were using it. It struck me as straddling the line between a high-level scripting language and an application’s internal macro syntax. It made it easy to automate end-user sorts of tasks and create real integration between (some) applications.
Building applications from scratch with Rexx would be painful, but using a Works-type package (like IBM Works) and an email package, a relatively non-technical person could build a nice set of customized customer-service tools for coordinating phone calls, email contact, and print mailmerges.
It’s a language that really tried to bridge the gap between the rarified air of the the software developer and the lowly end-user. Unfortunately, the model of allowing end-users access to powerful automation tools is not in vogue.
Oh, “News and Views” would
Oh, “News and Views” would be your beat, right? I’d forgotten that you might have been directly responsible for the column that I read. Thank you.
Re: the Newton. I have the as-yet-undisclosed location of the 2005 World Newton Conference. Trying to get confirmation. (Did that sound good?)
These were old DOS boxes,
These were old DOS boxes, Mod 80s with 8 – 12 megs of RAM, 32 meg hard disks and no PM — all text mode. We used it for a souped up batch processor to transmit files back and forth.
Sounds great!
And yes, I
Sounds great!
And yes, I write that column. They don’t byline it 🙁 but I’m credited for it in the masthead.
Yeah, I saw you as “News
Yeah, I saw you as “News Editor” and I didn’t see anyone listed as “Views Editor” so I figured you did both. =^)
“It struck me as straddling
And that’s exactly what it was used for on the Amiga… a system-level scripting language which could automate tasks inside of applications, as is now possible in Windows with COM/OLE and {VB|J}script. So I’m nostalgicizing over REXX too, a bit, though linguistically it ain’t much of a language.
Yeah, but isn’t COM/OLE with
Yeah, but isn’t COM/OLE with VB or JScript a few orders of magnitude more complex?
Honestly, Rexx “not being much of a language” is sort of one of its strengths. It’s simple and easy to learn without having to know too much about programming. Yes, I cringe when I look at my old Rexx code, but really if it were much steeper of a step up it wouldn’t have “straddled” so well.
I’ve had the argument with others (particularly) about whether “programming” should be in the exclusive domain of rarified software developers. I pointed out some of the systems I built with Rexx and he said “see? you’re a software developer!” But the point was that I could pick up a pretty simple set of tools and do some great things with them without a lot of computer science background. The tools available on most platforms are either really difficult to learn or they don’t provide a lot of power to a non-technical user.
I’ve really moved beyond Rexx, but I do look back with great fondness at an approach that I think was doomed by experts fearing being replaced by the unwashed masses. Even as I get closer to experthood, I’d still rather the unwashed masses could get the benefit of some simple coding.
COM/OLE is more complex
COM/OLE is more complex mostly just because it’s object-oriented. Aside from that, the basic situation is kind of the same in either case: it’s up to the application to construct an interface that is accessible to the scripter. But OLE is admittedly better at passing data around than Rexx ever could be.
And it remains a shame how few applications are willing to do a decent job at exposing their functionality this way, making themselves scriptable. MS Office is an example of something that makes itself strongly scriptable, but other examples aren’t that common. There’s a lot that someone who isn’t a “real” programmer can do at the Windows desktop level with COM scripting, and it isn’t taught or talked about nearly as much as it could be. Unix people know all about scripting, and Windows people don’t much, though they have some decent capabilities available. And hacquers do often provide COM-based tools that can be used in scripts… for instance, I recently needed to read the width and height of a JPEG in a script, to generate HTML tags to suit it, and I found a COM object out there that fit the bill exactly.
“I’ve had the argument with
“I’ve had the argument with others (particularly euthymia) about whether ‘programming’ should be in the exclusive domain of rarified software developers.…”
Apparently that was the argument you were having. The one I was having was a different one: whether the presence of powerful scripting in a desktop OS is something of critical value to everyday users (and therefore something that OS suppliers are likely to give resources to).
My contention was (and is) that it’s something that 95% of users will never touch, therefore not something that is a high priority for developers of said desktop OS’s (notably Microsoft and Apple).
Notice the lack of the word “should” anywhere in there?
Your contention seemed to be that Micro$oft was trying to keep everyone down, man, by deliberately leaving scripting out of Windoze.
Presumably so that the receptionists of the world will be prevented from creating amazingly useful scripts that would make them less dependent on Micro$oft? I dunno. I still find it difficult to believe that Microsoft would give the average desktop user that much credit.
If I had known at the time that your Universal Mis-translator was mutating my assertion to “ ‘programming’ should be in the exclusive domain of rarified software developers,” I would have set you straight, ’cause that’s laughable.
I’m glad I have the chance now.
Well, gosh. I thought the
Well, gosh. I thought the discussion was about whether such things should be part of operating systems, not whether they were or were likely to be. I was talking about whether there was a benefit to end-users and you were talking about whether Microsoft would provide that benefit. Silly me!
As I recall, you made the
As I recall, you made the assertion that Windows OSes traditionally had crappy support for scripting because Micro$oft was afraid of putting too much programming power in the hands of the regular Joes and Janes who use their software.
I disagreed, saying that the reason was more likely that Microsoft thinks that their development resources are better utilized elsewhere, that they didn’t think that regular shmoes in offices would USE more powerful scripting tools.
*I* as a matter of fact, don’t think that very many office folks would care too much about it either. Some do, obviously, but not enough for Microsoft to care. The regular users I’ve known in my many office jobs have had a hard enough time figuring out the value of being able to print to a networked printer, much less the value of automating computer tasks.
Microsoft is in business to make money, and they make money by including features that people are interested in using.
I once had the job of scripting various network tasks in an NT 4.0 environment and was astonished at how much better Novell’s scripting was. I thought that if Microsoft were marketing this thing as an enterprise server product, it should come with some decent scripting, or at least have a package available. So I see the need for scripting, but mostly among network people and in-house programmers (like you).
Anyway, where we disagreed (at first) was: you claimed that powerful scripting tools would be VERY important to Joe and Jane office worker.
Which is a good, debatable point: is powerful scripting important enough to the average user (not the network guru like me) for Microsoft to put it in their desktop OS?
Maybe, maybe not. I say probably not. You say surely so.
Don’t know how it went astray.…perhaps at some point, since I agreed with this one decision Microsoft made (and I don’t do that often:-), I was assumed to agree with everything you imagine them to believe.