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Carl Sassenrath Talks About REBOL

Posted by timothy on from the bol-and-rebol-on-fence dept.

Rebelos writes: "REBOL is a powerful software technology (ever thought that you could write a full blown GUI Instant Messenger in only 7 KB of source code?) optimized specifically for Internet usage. Rebol Tech, the company behind REBOL, consists of only 10 people and they claim they can compete and go against .NET and Microsoft's dubious plans. Their platform has been ported to 44 operating systems so far! Take a look as to what Carl Sassenrath, ex-AmigaOS/Commodore engineer and founder of Rebol, says at OSNews about the Rebol platform, its deployment, other programming languagees, Microsoft etc." The buzzwords are pretty thick in here, and the ideas are interesting, if a little vague. If the interview makes you curious, check out the previous stories touching on Rebol as well.

4 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Aha! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    But that is the whole point!
    REBOL is an *internet language*. For example, you can't write a graphics application with it (until now...). But if you want to write a fully featured GUI NewsReader, an Email Client, an IM or anything related to Internet or other simpler stuff (like a calculator, a simple word processor etc), then you can do it easily, because REBOL supports all these protocols internally!
    So, as C has a printf() and a uint32 for example, REBOL has an email DataType! It has a NewsReader DataType etc!
    Each language is good for some things and not so good for others. REBOL is the absolute Internet language.

  2. Licensing by Eloquence · · Score: 5, Informative
    The problem with REBOL, IIRC, is its license. The professional interpreter is commercially sold, which means that you have to license it even for distributing your apps, since REBOL does not generate executables. At least the standard version is free beer. But this probably makes it more expensive than VB, where you only pay for the platform once. So it can't compete on Win32, and without being OSS, it will hardly be able to compete on non-mainstream platforms.

    That's a real shame, because other than that, it is really quite impressive. They should think about a Transgaming-like business model, where users subscribe and the code becomes free when there are enough subscribers.

  3. Re:A meta-circular view of a bovine backside by alienmole · · Score: 5, Informative
    was designed from a meta-circular view of language semantics

    He didn't just make that term up, if that's what you're thinking. A "metacircular" language is a language which is implemented in itself. The most common example of this is Lisp - in fact, the very first computer language interpreter ever was a Lisp interpreter, written in a Lisp-like language as something of a mathematical exercise, by John McCarthy around 1958. This approach has proved very powerful, and some good language implementations have been written this way.

    The term is probably most famously used in SICP, in a section entitled The Metacircular Evaluator.

    Of course, none of this implies that REBOL is any good, but the fact that Sassenrath is aware of such things is probably a good sign. If you read the rest of the paragraph after the term "meta-circular", you'll see that he is actually referring to a relevant aspect of REBOL, namely that the GUI system is implemented in a dialect of REBOL. So it isn't quite as bad as if he'd said that the language runs on free tachyon energy...

  4. Re:big deal by majcher · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes, Rebol, Python, and Perl are much simpler to program than .NET or Java. Yes, they run a few important things somewhat faster. But .NET and Java are natively compiled, fast,...

    I don't know about .NET, but Java is compiled into bytecode, which is run on a natively compiled byetcode interpreter. Just like Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. are. This has been a major piece of Java FUD for the longest time - it pretends to be a compiled language, because it doesn't want to be seen as "just another scripting language". As for the libraries and penetration available for Java, do you not think that if Sun had developed and spend untold millions marketing Perl or Python that they would not be in the same position? As a language, Java lacks in many areas - it's just the most popular kid on the block because it's dad happens to be rich.