Rebol's future
rebol.com
Rebol's future
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Rebol's future
#2Why Rebol was never open-sourced I will never know. I guess Carl came from a different time and the non-Unix/non-academic world where software tools were sold at a high price.
Rebol has so many interesting ideas in it that it really could have carved a respectable niche in the world of networked programming languages. Just having sensible pragmatic built-in types for email and money was enough to bring it to my attention.
It's is a very odd but amazingly powerful little language worthy of study by anyone interested in language design. It has been a big influence on me even if I have never used it for anything 'real'.
Re: Rebol's future
#3Non open source language and no huge company shoving it down people's throats (like MS/VB): people won't care. At best it will be a niche like Rebol.
Re: Rebol's future
#4Carl Sassenrath is the designer of the original AmigaOS. Respect!
Re: Rebol's future
#5Carl Sassenrath is the designer of the original AmigaOS. Respect!
That's the main reason why I learned REBOL back in the day. I could build something on my Amiga and it would work the same no matter what platform.
Re: Rebol's future
#6Why Rebol was never open-sourced I will never know. I guess Carl came from a different time and the non-Unix/non-academic world where software tools were sold at a high price. Rebol has so many interesting ideas in it that it really could have carved a respectable niche in the world of networked programming languages. Just having sensible pragmatic built-in types for email and money was enough to bring it to my atten…
The Red language[1] was created exactly for the reason that REBOL was never open-source.
Red looks like it's still in active development, and "heavily inspired by REBOL."
Re: Rebol's future
#7If Carl had the presence of mind back in 1998 and open sourced enough of the Rebol eco system to be useful for web platform development, then /index.r rather than /index.php might have been one of the most popular default documents in the world.
As an aside, you can tell how interested (or not) Carl is in the future of Rebol by the fact that he's clearly not reading and responding to comments in that blog post. Otherwise he'd have cleaned up the spam comments that have been posted there days ago.
Re: Rebol's future
#8I found this in the comments to the blog post - Topaz, a REBOL inspired (but not compatible) language which compiles to javascript[1]. I found it worthy of it's own submission[2] with more info.
Re: Rebol's future
#9Why Rebol was never open-sourced I will never know. I guess Carl came from a different time and the non-Unix/non-academic world where software tools were sold at a high price. Rebol has so many interesting ideas in it that it really could have carved a respectable niche in the world of networked programming languages. Just having sensible pragmatic built-in types for email and money was enough to bring it to my atten…
The Red language[1] was created exactly for the reason that REBOL was never open-source. Red looks like it's still in active development, and "heavily inspired by REBOL." [1] http://www.red-lang.org/
It may be the case that Red was created for the reason you state, but it simply doesn't appear to have the necessary momentum. And that's unfortunate, because REBOL does not have a lot of interesting and smart features, such as having mini-DSLs ("dialects") for things like GUIs.
To date, Red can't even run without already having REBOL installed on your system. The project has been around for almost two years now, and only a few days ago has it successfully been able to do the program "print 1".
Re: Rebol's future
#10If Carl had the presence of mind back in 1998 and open sourced enough of the Rebol eco system to be useful for web platform development, then /index.r rather than /index.php might have been one of the most popular default documents in the world. As an aside, you can tell how interested (or not) Carl is in the future of Rebol by the fact that he's clearly not reading and responding to comments in that blog post. Other…
> If Carl had the presence of mind back in 1998 and open sourced enough of the Rebol eco system to be useful for web platform development, then /index.r rather than /index.php might have been one of the most popular default documents in the world.
Not only that, the price point is incredibly high at $249.00. I say this as a person who actually has a REBOL/Pro license. It was never clear to me what the business model for this product was, especially since the free version of REBOL was often more up-to-date and feature-complete than the paid product.