On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 10:37 AM, Tim Daneliuk <tun...@tundraware.com> wrote: > I find these kinds of discussions sort of silly. Once there is a critical > mass of installed base, no language EVER dies.
Not sure about that. Back in the 1990s, I wrote most of my code in REXX, either command-line or using a GUI toolkit like VX-REXX. Where's REXX today? Well, let's see. It's still the native-ish language of OS/2. Where's OS/2 today? Left behind. REXX has no Unicode support (it does, however, support DBCS - useful, no?), no inbuilt networking support (there are third-party TCP/IP socket libraries for OS/2 REXX, but I don't know that other REXX implementations have socket services; and that's just basic BSD sockets, no higher-level protocol handling at all), etc, etc. Sure, it's not technically dead... but is anyone developing the language further? I don't think so. Is new REXX code being written? Not a lot. Yet when OS/2 was more popular, REXX definitely had its installed base. It was the one obvious scripting language for any OS/2 program. Languages can definitely die, or at least be so left behind that they may as well be dead. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
