Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sat 5th May 2007 20:27 UTC, submitted by Sébastien Jeudy
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
The question is, who is using it in anger, and for what?
I'm a full time REBOL software developer and use it to make crossplatform applications that work on Mac, Linux and Windows. Furthermore, I'm also depending very much on REBOL for the development pipeline from prototyping, coding, testing and all the way to software deployment, update and hopefully soon I'll be able to use REBOL to sell the software as well and then use it to handle customer feedback.
Actually I also use AltME, which is built in REBOL, to communicate with other REBOL developers. Most stable communications system I've ever used.
http://www.altme.com
It is simply way more immersive than any other language could ever hope to be.
I fell into the rabbit hole that is REBOL a few years ago and it's both fun and frustrating. It's fun, because you can practically do anything with it as long as it's not requiring super high performance, like 3D gaming. Well, not 3D gaming yet, at least, but perhaps that will be covered soon as well. The language design is exquisite and extremely well thought out. You don't notice this for real until after a few months of usage.
The code is so damn small, I've seen people flat out not believing that's what's required to create a full program.
It's frustrating because still only a few people use it and all of us are tied 100% to development and growing the platform ever larger with a more comprehensive software library.
It's frustrating, because so few people are getting it and not really trying to use it, scoff it, because it's "strange" or "weird", when it's actually exceptionally cleverly put together. I've talked to developers, who've nearly been fired for using it, because it's not popular, or the boss has never heard of it ("REBOL? Rebel? Is that something those criminal hackers use?"), despite being able to solve problems far more effectively than other languages. This is why you don't hear so many success stories.
It's also a bit frustrating to be waiting for REBOL 3 which will solve 8 years of collecting design problems and shortcomings with REBOL 2 and add a ton of new things, such as being freed from using an underlying OS. REBOL 3 has been under construction since early 2006, so we'll probably see something soon.
Success stories are few, simply because there are so few REBOL developers, but here's a little one from me:
A friend of mine had to take the content of a German website with a bad layout and convert it to Danish with a prettier layout, suitable for putting it on a projector screen with live updating. This meant using a webserver, read content from another webserver, parse the content and put it in a separate HTML file that could be displayed as a normal webpage.
He was given 2 days to solve it and asked me how to do it. I helped putting a solution together for him in less than 2 hours, which involved a 9 kB webserver written in REBOL, parsed the original site and delivered the new content with less than 100 lines of code.
I'm sure other REBOL developers have better stories than this one, but these time savings are pretty typical.
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Member since:
2005-10-12
The question is, who is using it in anger, and for what? Where are the projects and success stories? If you're considering learning a scripting language, consider Python. You have thousands, probably tens of thousands of pages of documentation at all levels, you've wxpython, pythoncard, lots of ide's. There is no problem finding examples. Rebol, search for yourself on Amazon - you're stuck with several year old used copies of manuals.
It makes it hard to judge usability and stability. It is a very attractive concept. I just wonder how serious a proposition it is to get committed to, given the alternatives.