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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. big deal by mj6798 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  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. A meta-circular view of a bovine backside by mickwd · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. 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...