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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.
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.
As for "going against .NET", big efforts like that are not about technology, they are about marketing and people. And they are also about the long-term availability and tools support that a large company like Microsoft (or Sun, in the case of Java) brings to the table.
But even technologically, it is an error to confuse a scripting language with a system like .NET or Java. 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, general-purpose programming environments with static type checking and large libraries (written in Java itself in the case of Java), and that just makes them much more useful for large-real world problems. You see, another misconception is that the easier you make programming in a language, the more useful it is in real-world applications.
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.
No matter what you think about Microsoft and its practices, the .NET strategy is more likely to attract a wide variety of developers because it allows them to use most any language they want. (.NET has an OS lockin problem, but the 90%/10% ratio is in MS's favor in that case).
REBOL may be extremely cool; I'm going to have to take a look at the language spec. However, I don't think that any single language will ever take over the whole world.
If it weren't for rebol I wouldn't have a 25 line script to grab the stock market closes every day from yahoo.com. If you want to get batches of web pages and parse them for useful information, use rebol. It rocks.
If it were more widely accepted, rebol would make a really sweet web language, too, allowing more control over the interface, with less garbage in the page's source code.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
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.
REBOL might be fantastic for all I know. But when I hear some-one say that something "was designed from a meta-circular view of language semantics" that sounds like the perfect description of bullshit to me.
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).
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
The Lisp-like language I was referring to is the one listed on this page - look for the heading "The First Known Interpreter". This language is not Lisp as we know it - it used McCarthy's M-expression syntax - and syntactically, it is not the S-expression language that the first interpreter was capable of interpreting. Hence my statement that "the very first computer language interpreter ever was a Lisp interpreter, written in a Lisp-like language".
In "The implementation of Lisp" by McCarthy himself, he describes the following:
This was why I said McCarthy wrote the interpreter as something of a mathematical exercise. He was writing his "universal Lisp function" to illustrate a point in a paper, and didn't even consider that he was writing an interpreter - apparently Steve Russell noticed that. So that's why I said it was written as "something of a mathematical exercise".Do I get that cigar now?
I'm running eight different rebol apps on my system all at the same time. Each weighs in at between 6 and 12 MBytes. That's waay too much for such primitive apps (like that calculator using up 6,804K ). With such memory consumption this thing just eats memory like peanuts more so than Java. That's why I find Java unacceptable and that's why I think this stuff is crap too.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Bashing languages with the usual "But you can also do that in language X!" comments and general defensive put-downs is misguided. Of course you can do the same thing in any language; that's a fundamental principle of computer science. The reason we have a variety of languages is because some languages make things easier than others.
In Perl, munging through text files is a snap. The syntax is succint, and regular expressions are supported at the language level. But that doesn't mean Perl is good for everything, though. Regular expressions don't scale up to what you'd need to write a full BNF parser in Perl. And, sure, you can hook to http and ftp libraries, but they aren't integrated into the language in the same way that the "file exists?" operator is.
REBOL has several strengths. One is that its parsing features effectively *are* BNF, so you can write complex parsers for mini-languages with great ease, and without resorting to lex, yacc, and such. The other advantage is that having language-level support for internet protocols is very convenient. Sure, you can get at them through a Perl module, but if you argue that then you have to ask why regular expressions shouldn't be a separate module as well.
All this blind bashing of languages is tiring. It's exactly like the kiddies who bash whatever game console they didn't get for Christmas.