[Tfug] Language choices

[Chad Woolley]

I wrote a ton of REXX on the mainframe with I worked at IBM.  It was a
nice little procedural scripting language (I never used Object REXX).
I'm glad I don't use it anymore.  It's main shortcoming would be that
it is an obscure language created and primarily used by IBM, with
little 3rd party library support.

If you are going to script anything in the 21st century, I'd strongly
recommend Ruby, unless you are on some platform that doesn't support
it - and most should, if not natively then it's easy to build from
source.  Actually, on Debian, I'd recommend building it from source
over Apt, because they have horribly hacked it up to conform with
Debian's packaging guidelines.

Ruby is clean, concise, well-designed, and best of all,
object-oriented from the ground up.  It supports blocks and closures.
It's designed to follow the principle of least surprise, and it reads
very easily in english-like syntax (even though it was originally
written by guy from Japan).  Theres a ton of 3rd-party libraries to
support it, and an easy mechanism to auto-download them (RubyGems).
You get the best of all worlds.

I just got back from RubyConf 2006, and this language is gaining a lot
of traction, ever since it got a big popularity boost from the Ruby on
Rails web framework.  But even aside from Rails, it's a great
language.  IBM is supporting it, and Microsoft sent an evangalist to
the conference.  I always hear people talking about how it's their
favorite language now - and these are professional developers who have
worked with a lot of languages.  I agree with them.

-- Chad

On 10/26/06, Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Does anyone have any first hand, "in depth"
> experience with ML or REXX -- enough to be able
> to comment on their strengths and shortcomings
> for <any_particular> application domain?
>
> Thanks,
> --don
>
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