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.

Comments

Re:Bold claims

[PlaysWithMatches]

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.

Re:rebol kicks bootie

[ikekrull]

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.