A Look at the Main JVM Languages Today
, February 14, 2012 The JVM hosts an increasingly wide array of languages. Here we compare the prominent ones, mourn those that have come and gone, and celebrate newborn languages clamoring for attention.
NetRexx
NetRexx was the first attempt to create a scripting language that would reduce a lot of the syntactical ceremony in Java. Released as a free product but as closed source, NetRexx was initially popular until it became clear that IBM was not going to keep moving it forward or open up the project. After neglecting NetRexx for years, IBM released it last year to the RexxLA development team, where it now resides at www.netrexx.org. As of this month, the team has released its first update (v. 3.01). Whether this is enough to bring NetRexx back to life remains to be seen.