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

big deal

[mj6798]

High level scripting languages are a dime a dozen. Systems like expectk and wxPython give you similar ease of programming. If you like something more Lisp-ish, there are various Scheme systems with built-in GUIs. The main thing that distinguishes Rebol is that you can't get an open source implementation of it and that it has a much smaller user community.

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.

Licensing

[Eloquence]

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.

Language Lockin problem

[Waffle Iron]

There have been quite a few self-contained systems architecture solutions put out over the years (Java and Smalltalk come to mind), and this looks like another one. All of them meet a lot of resistance because they make you use a language that is not the favorite language of the 90% of developers out there who have a different favorite language.

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.

rebol kicks bootie

[LazyDawg]

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.

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.

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.

A meta-circular view of a bovine backside

[mickwd]

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.

Re:A meta-circular view of a bovine backside

[alienmole]

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...

All this angst!

[Junks Jerzey]

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.