Mike Cowlishaw, developer of the REXX language, author of several books,
and IBM Fellow for quite some time, will take early retirement from IBM
March 5. It's hard to exaggerate -- or even grasp, really -- how much
REXX changed IBM computing and how those lucky enough to know REXX get
their work done.
While many people provided feedback, suggestions, criticism, etc. during
REXX development, it was Mike's project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REXX says:
REXX was designed and first implemented, in assembly language
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language>, as an 'own-time'
project between 20 March 1979 and mid-1982 by Mike Cowlishaw
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Cowlishaw> of IBM, originally as a
scripting programming language
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_programming_language> to replace
the languages EXEC <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXEC> and EXEC 2
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXEC_2>^[1]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REXX#cite_note-0> . It was designed to be
a macro <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_%28computer_science%29> or
scripting language for any system. As such, REXX is considered a
precursor to Tcl <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl> and Python
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_%28programming_language%29>. REXX
was also intended by its creator to be a simplified and easier to learn
version of the PL/I <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I> programming
language.
Some Mike links:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/cowlishaw.index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Cowlishaw
http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Mike-Cowlishaw
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/cowlishaw.bio.html
...and that's only four out of 31,200 Google hits on "Mike Cowlishaw".
His email address will be m...@speleotrove.com.
--
Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. (703) 204-0433
3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042 g...@gabegold.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gabegold
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