Rexx became reality on March 20th, 1979. Why is that day considered Rexx's birthday? According to Mike Cowlishaw, "'twas the day I woke up at 3am with a clear idea of what was needed, and by the end of the day had the initial specification off around the world for comment."
Rexx, and its many alterations, serves many purposes. On some platforms, it allows the interconnection of many unrelated programs. Each piece of software supports a Rexx Port, which allows the scripting language to attach to that program and obtain special functions which communicate directly with the software. This is most popular on the Amiga (ARexx) and OS/2 platforms. Rexx also is an old IBM mainframe language, and many client/server applications to this very day are built on Rexx code.
Rexx, with the programming-ease of BASIC and the function characteristics of C, allows efficient programs to be written very quickly. It is easily ported from one platform to the next, due to reasonable standardization.
Rexx makes it possible to create CGI-controlled christmas lights via X10 (and other wacky stuff), with about 5 minutes of development time.
