[vidarh]

As a language Arexx was pretty awful, but the pervasiveness of Arexx ports and user expectation that "everything" should be accessible to script made it immensely useful anyway.

E.g dbus on Linux is comparatively underused because the threshold to using it is too high.

[EvanAnderson]

I think my unreasonable expectations for applications to be scriptable today comes from my experience with the Amiga.

I didn't know the words "interprocess communication" when I first encountered Arexx and Aress ports. I came from a mostly MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 background. I hadn't used much multitasking software up to that point.

Once I grokked why Arexx ports could be cool and useful I had a terrible time trying to explain them to non-"Amiga people". I remember a friend asking to be shown the "Arexx port" on my Amiga 1200 trying to explain it was a software construct and not a physical hardware device. I'm not sure if knowing the words "interprocess communication" would have helped, but it couldn't have hurt.

I feel like I've spent a significant part of my sysadmin career making dodgy hacks to bolt-on IPC functionality to applications that don't properly expose any. Fortunately it feels like it happens a lot less today than, say, 25 years ago.

[vidarh]

Yeah, on Linux even when there are dbus ports (systems and Gnome have plenty) they're relatively poorly known and/or not much less of a pain to use than a "proper" API.

If you need a schema or binding, it's not good enough. If you have to hunt for docs, it's not good enough.