Slashdot Mirror
Carl Sassenrath Talks About REBOL
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.
I can code a full blown GUI Instant Messenger in less than 100 bytes! apt-get install gaim. But seriously, if you can fit that much information in 7kb, hasn't someone already had to basially write the messenger first?
They seem to be able to write such a small executable by building libraries especially for this project. Is anyone else thinking that a similar projet in C by them would have the following line: #include <guiMessenger.h>
I've used REBOL quite a bit, and I'll say one thing up front: this is not going to be a Microsoft killer, or a .Net killer, or whatever. But REBOL is very good at what it does, which is offer a high-level interface to web, e-mail, etc. scripting. The language is pretty nice once you get into it. But for 99% of my scripting, I still use Perl. Will that change because of REBOL? I doubt it.
Nice toy anyway, though.
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.
"...we have a partnership that will be putting REBOL onto 30 million desktops within the next few months."
I just had images of millions of AOL cd's dance through my head. With the types of services this provides and their claims to be a .NET alternative, who else could they be partnering up with?
Okay, so I downloaded the viewer 362K (so far so good..)
Run the installer, took a few seconds (great!)
Took a look at the demos, only a few seconds to download and view (quick!), and then I quickly lost interest. The demos are rubbish!
Visited some of the other Rebol enabled sites, the demos did not get any better!
I just don't see anybody wanting to write any serious applications for this platform. JNLP the Java web application launching protocol has much better demo applications available. http://java.sun.com/products/javawebstart
Show me a serious application such as a paint program or a game and i'll take this seriously otherwise forget it!
We really need a SPAM moderation, perhaps with a -2 attached to it. I'm really fucking sick of seeing your god-damn ads for your Artificial Minds project. You try to link the stupid thing to any and every topic posted to Slashdot.
After the second such post you're just alienating Slashdot readers that might otherwise have been interested in your project.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, look at Mentifex's user info:
http://slashdot.org/~Mentifex/
Click some of the links...Notice how every post he's made is an ad for his project, usually completely off-topic for the Slashdot article, but linked in with silly connections (ie. in an XP related post 'Artificial Minds (link included) will not use XP!').
Anyway, to keep THIS post somewhat on-topic, REBOL is a fairly nice language but it will never catch on with the silly greedy-licencing model they have. When is the last time a language that you had to pay royalties to use caught on? (Hint: Never).
well, theres at least 800k of statically linked libraries right there.
Without libraries, if you wanted to change or upgrade your HTTP component, you'd have to d/l another 900k executable, instead of using something nifty like the CPAN module.
There really is nothing stopping somebody from compiling Perl, Python, Tcl or any other language and a bunch of it's essential libraries into a single 'executable' you could use to do exactly what the REBOL environment does.
Its just not usually done, because most people using these tools recognize the benefits of being able to dynamically load libraries as needed, and add/upgrade/modify/swap them individually.
This is not to say that REBOL doesn't do the job, since it obviously does for your purposes.
However, I, like many others, would have to take issue with the idea that YAHASL (Yet Another Half Assed Scripting Language) is going to 'revolutionize the internet' in the same way that Java has completely failed to do.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I read that article three years ago. Most of the concerns that Mr. Wall mentioned back then have been fixed already, particularly the speed issues.
The version of REBOL that he was reviewing was based on a Scheme-like engine, and thus was comparable in speed to interpreted Scheme. More recent versions of REBOL, even a couple months more recent, have been based on a Forth-like engine. This allowed a sometimes ten-fold increase in speed with almost no language changes.
REBOL is now comparable in speed to Perl (often as fast, but with some differences, particularly math). No regular expressions though - you'll have to make due with the much more powerful recursive-decent parser dialect, with backtracking even. Oh well :)
Perl people might find the lack of operator precedence annoying, though (and probably the readable code as well). You get used to it.
It doesnt matter how good the language is, it has to have support, qualified developers (pref. with certification), people running courses for it, and get written up in some mags like Wired that management types are going to read if it is going to become something that mainstream software shops use. Personally I don't see the advantage over say using Java or even Mozilla as a GUI (using XUL) and Perl as a scripting language for this sort of thing.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Java is a marketing buzzword that covers a variety of technologies. Quoting http://java.sun.com/java2/whatis/:
Notice how they don't say "Java is a language..."?In the Java 1.0 days there were essentially three things referred to as Java: the JVM, the language, and the standard library. Oh, and maybe something about delivery of applets through sandboxed bytecode. Four things Sun wanted you to think of for the term "Java". Now there are a zillion. Soon, there will be a zillion and fifty.
OK, OK, those aren't at the same architectural level as the big three components. But "Java" has become increasingly vague, and don't think Sun isn't encouraging this. They want non-directed feelings of goodness associated with whatever's in their (proprietary) platform this week.
If what people wanted from Java was just a language, in the traditional view of what a language is, gcj would have taken over the world by now.