From: arne@vajhoej.dk

On 12/16/2025 4:20 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> On 12/16/25 8:05 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
>> There is, evidently, a need (or at least desire) for a really
>> good interpreted language to script various system management
>> tasks; I gather folks feel that DCL is a bit long in the tooth
>> and insufficient for that.  As I mentioned before, I feel like
>> that is qualitatively different than using DCL as an interactive
>> CLI; perhaps the solution here is just to build out a really
>> nice set of officially supported modules for, say, Python (or a
>> similar suitable language) and call it a day.
>
> Python, Perl, and Lua all exist. Probably all could use additional work
> for VMS-specific administrative tasks.  Not sure the state of Ruby,

I don't remember ever seeing MRI being ported to VMS.

>                                                                but
> there is JRuby.

Yes.

It was ported to VMS in the past.

And a recent version can build code on PC and run code on VMS.

>                 And at least a couple of other JVM-based scripting
> options.

There are lots.

Groovy
Jython - Python
Rhino/Nashorn - JavaScript
Quercus - PHP
LuaJ - Lua
JACL - Tcl
ABCL - Lisp
NetRexx - Rexx
etc.

But none of them are widely used on VMS.

Many of them are way behind in language version. Jython is Python 2.7,
Quercus is PHP 5.6 and so on.

They are typical great at integrating with Java stuff and not so
great integrating with native stuff. And the need to integrate
with native stuff is more common than the need to integrate with
Java stuff.

As Python 2.7 has become obsolete then I consider Groovy
the only feasible candidate for production ready JVM based
script language on VMS.

But I really do like Groovy.

(and I have also written a lot about it and how to integrate
it with stuff on VMS)

Arne

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