To celebrate the 1000th article of the magazine Obligement, Carl Sassenrath returns through this long interview on its origins at Amiga Inc. in the 1980's (Manager of AmigaOS and Amiga CDTV system development, among others), the bankruptcy of Commodore, its passages at Apple Computer and Viscorp, Amiga NG, or on its new revolutionary language REBOL. A classic name in the Silicon Valley!
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Member since:2005-07-10
This is a good link to read on the architecture of REBOL 3:
http://www.rebol.com/docs3/architecture.html
It's only a small part of it that will be closed, namely the language core. The rest is open so you can write the necessary parts you need to run REBOL 3 on a specific OS and support various hardware.
Edited 2007-05-05 22:20
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-03-28
Thanks for your opinion, renox. I am long time Rebol supporter and I would not like this tread to look like rebol loyal community member all defending Rebol in most possible ways :-)
But, back to your point. I am not sure money is the reason to keep the core closed source, or at least not the only one. And if so, you are right that it would be more honest for RT to admit it. However - to provide you with another perspective. Rebol is a bit different language (as functional languages tend to be :-), and when new member joins rebol community, we can see the typical questions - why it does not do it that way? Simply put - I remember Carl stating, that he put long years of thought into Rebol, and having it open sourced NOW could mean "contamination" of ideas by users not understanding his ideas properly, and makeing Rebol something different. You simply has to put the thingy into some few months usage, to actually think "the Rebol way".
So, for me R3 is definitely the step in the right direction - platform independent (easily recompillable) core is going to be kept private, the rest is simply becoming open-sourced. Fair enough to me. Later on, some +x years RT might eventually decide to open even core, who knows.
OTOH, sometimes the OS arguments sound funny to me, as one of my friends told me - hey, it is not open-sourced, I don't want to use it. I asked him, how often does he download php or python sources, or if he is able to eventually patch it himself - after some thought his answer was - well, I never download source nor am I able to fix things myself :-)
The community might be small, but is very friendly and open. Connect to AltME private chat, and you get your answers in minutes. From time to time you can chat with Carl himself, that is both educative and encouraging. Carl listens to every possible idea, he is a smart guy.
Well, someone mentioned docs, wxWidgets - well, we might wrap to those too, it was just not done yet. But look e.g. into community alternative UI, called RebGUI:
http://www.dobeash.com/rebgui.html
some screenshots of my custom colored/shaped RebGUI:
http://www.jablunkovsko.cz/pekr/rebgui-screenshot1.jpg
http://www.jablunkovsko.cz/pekr/rebgui-screenshot2.jpg
It provides developer with some fine detailed docs too ...
cheers & sorry for longish post ...
-pekr-
Member since:
2005-11-12
Simply put - Carl will keep closed source only the interpreter itself and only platform independent code (his know how). All platform specific stuff will be in a operating system abstrastion layer -- OSAL? :-) -- and this will be open allowing a community to help with porting, etc. Once done, we can compile the REBOL language library for the target OS/processor platform.
What is wrong with that?
It is going on my EFIKA as soon as I can manage it...
/rasmus