Being an ol' mainframe guy of 35+ years who has looked at a lot of
languages, I say REXX in conjunction with PIPELINES is unbeatable in terms
of writing speed and conciseness. You can get a lot of function in a few
lines of code.
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Ranga Nathan Subject: Re: Just stirring the pot
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Perl sure has some quirky syntax as some of it is derived from C.
Scheme is awesome but cryptic. Scheme is even more powerful than Perl, but
you have to rise above the mortals, you have to be a geek.
Python... hmm a language where indentation is part of the syntax?? ..
Ruby, I hear a lot of good things...
REXX, I have a lot of good things.... but smells mainframe. I dont like
any of the mainframe languages. They suffer from history too much.
Sorry, I am strongly opinionated.
David Boyes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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02/19/2004 11:17 AM
Please respond to Linux on 390 Port
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Subject: Re: Just stirring the pot
> If there is one language I love unequivocally, it is Perl.
> I like the TIMTOWTDI (tim tow tidi).
> I have applied it to solve the most difficult problems easily.
I don't deny Perl is useful. Larry Wall is considered to be a genius for a
number of reasons -- inventing a superior scripting language to csh or
Bourne scripts is (IMHO) the least of his achievements.
I *do* claim that Perl is unnecessarily syntactically grotesque -- in all
the dictionary senses of the word. If IBM had been wise enough to make
REXX
freely available at the time Perl was getting started, there were a number
of people that really wanted to make REXX widespread. Same thing with
NetREXX -- IMHO, it's a vastly superior language to Java -- but IBM
wouldn't
let it fly free at the time it would have made a difference. Thus we're
stuck with Java, a language that propagates the worst features of C *and*
C++, and fixes few to none of the flaws of either. Another thing to have
to
beat out of the new CS grads when they get to the Real World and have to
learn how to write maintainable code. I'd really like to find out who
thought teaching Scheme as the only real programming language in many of
the
local CS curricula was a good idea...
(my, I am getting cranky in my old age...bad morning, I guess. We're out
of
coffee. grr.)
PHP and Python are somewhat better, but REXX is far cleaner and far easier
to understand at a glance (and teach to normal mortals with real jobs
other
than computing) than any of the other three, IMHO. I always considered the
System Product Interpreter Users Guide one of the best self-teaching
manuals
ever written -- *any* random yo-yo can learn enough REXX to be useful from
that book.
Too late now, but if only things had been different....
-- db
