REBOL the "Messaging Language"

FunkflY writes " From the Rebol Hompage"REBOL (pronounced "REB-ul"), the first in a new breed of Internet messaging languages, today revolutionized the exchange and interpretation of network-based information by allowing programs authored in REBOL/core 2.0 to run on more than 15 popular computing platforms without modification. As a messaging language, REBOL provides seamless network connectivity to the Internet protocols such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP, NNTP, Finger, and others." " A new version came out recently-worth checking out.

Comments

REBOL thread on c.l.python

[AMK]

Back in October when REBOL first came out, there was an interesting, and surprisingly even-handed, thread about it in comp.lang.python. The consensus was that REBOL is basically Scheme -- Scheme dressed up in an infix format to avoid triggering parenthephobia.

• Tim Peters, 1
• Tim Peters, 2

Personally, I can't imagine why anyone in 1999 is bothering to release a new language without making the source code available. Haven't we learned better by now?

Re:Check what you piss on before you piss...

[ink]

I am beginning to hate Linux USERS, because they just don't seem to know any better. REBOL looks great, and has promise. "Awww, but it may not be GPL, therefore it sucks." "Ahhh, it ain't Perl" "Why do we need another language" Shit like this really scares me when I think about the intelligence level of a lot of Linux users. I must say, Windows may suck, but Windows users don't. I know a lot of Windows users that embrace new development technologies, while Slashdot is full of whinning programmers who feel that if you can't do it in C/Perl, you shouldn't be a programmer.

Linux is part of the Free Software movement. If you don't like that then you should present clean, concise reasoning why we should never discuss it. You are making HUGE generalizations about Linux and Windows users and you ought to learn how to present a rational argument instead of this silly banter.

Why shouldn't we critique the license under which new software is released? Why should we accept everything developed for Linux with beggar's hands? We shouldn't and we don't (surprise). If that offends you, I'm not sorry and I won't apologize for "whinning programmer" bretheren for it is you who is doing the whinning here.

As for the issues; UNIX is based on small utilities which do one thing well. None of the examples on their website showed anything revolutionary or even interesting when compared to BASH. What's the difference between doing

send luke@rebol.com "Hello World!"

and

echo "Hello World" | mail luke@rebol.com

It is any surprise that were not very impressed?

Perl is a schitzophrenic language. It can look good, it can look bad. It can be object-oriented, it can be iterative, it can be threaded, it can be modularized. It can embed code from other languages, it can communicate with the native OS using native constructs, it can be graphical, it can be ttyable. It is what you want it to be, and yes, it should be compared to REBOL because they are trying to solve the same problems.

But I suppose you'd rather whine about Linux users with your time. What a joke. And as for the Amiga user: get over it. I used to be an Amiga user and I don't expect the Linux community to "care about my feelings" or other such bullshit. If you want to compare something with AREXX then do it. If you want to spout how 31337 you are because you're the "only" one to ever use it, you have no business raking Linux users over the coals for doing the same thing with Perl and C. Shut up and present a post with content.

The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

Re:Amiga?

[DGolden]

Well, Carl Sassenrath developed the "classic" AmigaOS - which was a 32-bit, preemptive multitasking, message-passing OS, running on 68k series chips (N.B. even the 68000, though it had a 16-bit data bus, had 32-bit registers (16 of 'em, not 4...), so the OS was always written (well, 1.3 and above) to be 32-bit) -but it lacked true memory protection (it came fairly close with pervasive semaphore locking in software, and a few other tricks. My amiga without true memory protection was always more stable than W95's so-called memory protection...) - CPUs with MMUs wre prohibitively expensive at design time of the original amiga.

The Amiga OS had lots of good features, though, some of which linux is only catching up to now. A lot of its more esoteric and underused functions were actually quite cool, for the time. e.g. The Envoy networking software, in conjunction with ARexx, had "gateways" that could be used for message passing, scripting, etc, between clusters of Amigas - basically anything that a local arexx program could do, could also be sent through the gateways to other amigas. I also liked the dynamically resizing ramdisk - it was always handy. The support for multiple resolutions and colour depths on different screens simultaneously was also very useful. This was possible due to the custom hardware, though, which really made the amiga what is was.

It's also really easy to program for in C or macro assembler, and its system include files work very well, and were very well written (on average) - I liked taglists for function parameters, exec lists were really useful, etc. etc.

A lot of Linux people are ex-amiga people. Rasterman springs to mind. Imlib's kinda like datatypes, and enlightenment on X obviously borrows from the amiga workbench on intuition.

Amiga OS 5.0 is a different kettle of fish. It's built upon QNX, which is a very good RTOS. It has relatively little to do with Amiga OSes 0 to 3, other than the name, and the fact that some of the original amiga people are designing it "in the spirit of the original amiga" - whatever that's supposed to mean.

Rebol is a pretty easy language to learn, and very easy to read. However, I'd expect the Amiga NG people to include several scriptiing languages- they'll probably include the GNU tools, for a start, at least in the developer release of the OS.