World: r3wp

the fact that it uses http, html and js... doesn't make it different 
from any other stupid dumb terminal.

advocacy ..

this is not advocacy... I'm not talking about REBOL.... :-P

Pekr, please. Log into R3-Alpha and look in the old talks (also before 
you were invited there). You'll find many posts from me. I often 
choose not to talk, when the noise level go up. When you entered 
R3-Alpha, the noise level raised a great deal, so you will find fewer 
post from me at the time forward.

Talk talk talk isn't solving many things. Saying the right things 
in little words can be a benefit sometimes.

Yes, and there was the second world - R3 GUI, and Carl invited me, 
because top 10 developers did not provide much of responses. That 
world was imo very well focused, only handset of ppl there. That 
contradicts your claims ...

As I said - I don't care anymore.

You can apply "talk talk talk" to yourself as well :-) I can bet 
that you don't have the right thing to say. Or you might try to define 
actions RT or the community should take, to bring any REBOL advancement 
on-board.

All I see here is failure to realize what R3 is about and why it's 
dangerous to clone or fork it. If it were simply a programming language 
then it wouldn't be much of a big deal, because other languages are 
in a similar state of confusing disarray. Programmers are used to 
having to select an implementation of a language. It would be bad, 
but it wouldn't be terrible. REBOL has the luxury of not being in 
this state. Since R3 is an OS-like platform, much more is at stake, 
because people may decide not to be interested in R3's biggest features 
at all.


Extensions and host code opens up a big employment gap that is potentially 
never filled, if people decide impatiently to just clone REBOL, if 
they are unhappy with a particular aspect of R3, because they didn't 
either study it hard enough, don't realize how hard Carl is working 
on servicing exactly those people or just can't wait 2 months for 
that feature to be implemented or this and that bug to be fixed.


Having 10 REBOL alternatives diminishes the much needed authority 
of the original REBOL and it diminishes the authority Carl has over 
the language. REBOL can't grow without that authority. That's also 
why things like Linux isn't doing any better than it is, because 
of massive re-inventing of the same crap over and over again slightly 
differently, because people in that environment haven't had an ultimate 
design authority to work against. We have that here and we must not 
lose it. That is what allows REBOL to grow way beyond other platforms.


But I realize also that such growth is not in many people's interest 
or within their grasp. They just want a turd polished in a different 
color rather than wait for the flower to grow.


This is one case where evolution is not needed. Intelligent design 
is needed.

Talk in R3-Alpha started 3-Oct-2008. The reason R3-Alpha didn't get 
much attention? I guess, the same reason many didn't went to R3 chat.

Henrik - I don't even have problem with existence of a clone (if 
such clone would be clone of the interpretter and used Host code, 
so that we could have swap-in solution). I don't have problem with 
things being open-source at all. But - what I am looking for is - 
project management. It is not enough to just state - let's support 
Boron, cause it takes too long for RT to finish the project.


Things should be balanced. Hence I ask only for one things - someone 
stating A (e.g. Boron), should be able to also state B (many questions, 
as - 1) why do we expect the project will draw any attention, even 
even Orca did not succeed here? 2) where are our resources available? 
Who is willing and has enough of time to contribute, so that we don't 
wait another 3 years for such a solution? 3) Will it be 100% compatible 
to official future product - R3? If not, isn't it a risk? We already 
face R3 vs R2 incompatibility. Do we need another layer?)

I could understand it some 2-3 years earlier. But now so close to 
beta, with host code soon to be released to first group of testers 
(Max, Cyphre, Brian, according to docs), I don't really don't understand 
what some ppl are questioning here. Last year has seen reboot in 
the R3 development attitude. Gee, 80+ tickets fixed monthly, Carl 
and Brian taking care for each ticket, anyone can influence the development 
and design, etc.

Geomol :-) There were two worlds - R3-alpha - crowdy, lots of talks, 
there was really much of noise (not just by me), as it was the period, 
where Carl e.g. disappeared for some period of time. But then there 
was another world - VID3.4 related, called R3-GUI, there's just 9 
ppl ...

(not just by me = not only by me)

I named the group wrong. I should have written:


Talk in R3-GUI started 3-Oct-2008. The reason R3-GUI didn't get much 
attention? I guess, the same reason many didn't went to R3 chat.

group = world

So, sadly, Romano was right... it's all turning to a second Amiga...

what's turning to Amiga?

(I guess rebol .. so in what way or why??)

Is it that bad? ;-)
Let's learn from all this.

Only bad if it follows through to the same conclusion...

I newer saw an Amiga in my life an don't know anything about them 
... so what's the story there? They were better than anything but 
somehow failed to the inferior PC-s or something else?

Janko - as for Amiga, there is so many aspects to its decline, that 
I don't know what had Gabriele in mind.

First thing is, that Commodore went under. Carl, in one interview 
at the time when he joined Viscorp in order to ressurect it, said 
that innovation has stopped. So the first aspect was, that what caused 
Amiga to be succesfull, started to stagnate. The product was mostly 
repackaged upon the time, but not much technologically advanced. 
Here I can't see any parallel to Amiga, as R3 is development without 
compromise. We are even sacrifying compatibility, and trying to get 
the design right this time ...

Janko, in short, Commodore went bankrupt because of bad management, 
and Amiga was left with an uncertain future. The community got divided 
and people started to use bad language with each other. Like you 
see with very religious people, that defend their religion with all 
means against people thinking otherwise.

Then Amiga went thru Escom to Gateway to Amino, to Amiga Inc. (2 
incarnation of Amiga Inc.'s actually - Delaware and Washington). 
Then there was also a community split - some guys started to create 
MorphOS, a competing product.


But maybe what had Gabriele in mind is, that Amiga is almost dead 
due-to incompetence of parent company. The company does not communicate, 
it made some wrong decision (Amiga Anywhere product vs most ppl wanting 
official AmigaOS to evolve). AmigaOS was made second level product, 
and its development was subcontracted to Haage&Partner (OS 3.5, OS 
3.9). Then there was conflict between the companies and H&P refused 
to give away sources. So Hyperion stepped in, and was subcontracted 
to do OS4. The same situation - last month court granted Hyperion 
right to use AmigaOS trademark, and Amiga Inc. can't use it.

But - in Amiga case, you CAN'T see any single activity, any vision, 
any leadership. Amiga means many things to many ppl. In such a situation, 
it would be probably better, if some time back in 2K, the AOS sources 
were open-sources. It would probably stop clonning efforts (MorphOS, 
AROS, Anubis), and community would not fight for which one is better, 
there would be no split ...

I wonder if an adequate history has been written. Amiga users generally 
agree that Amiga was innovative and was ahead of its time. However, 
assessing which elements made it innovative and how to resurrect 
it, at least in spirit has long been an emotive issue, particularly 
with those invested in remnants of its legacy.

thanks both..  so there is a couple of novels material  there ...

As for me - the situation with REBOL is completly different. Big 
YES - in 2000 - 200x?, we faced similar thing - REBOL/View update 
in 18 month, difficult to communicate with RT, some ppl left, as 
things were not fixed.

(I just realized I was at some retro amiga event few years back, 
so I have seen it)

Janko, I liken the Amiga situation to flying the world's most advanced 
airplane into the ground and surviving passengers fighting on the 
ground over the twisted unsalvagable pieces, refusing to leave the 
accident site.

Commodore management was so spectacularly bad in the end, that it 
could have been on purpose.

that's illustrative

I guess Gabriele's alluding to that they all missed the bigger trends 
and faded to irrelevence.

In fact, what Geomol and some other ppl claim is - that we wait very 
long, at that it would be nice to have some other option available. 
They are right in following aspects - we can't still help much with 
R3 development. So far it is still done by Carl.


But, that is not 100% true, just some 90% - we can help writing VID, 
networking protocols ... yet noone did it.


I can understand Geomol - when R3 was announced, it was supposed 
to be out in few months, whereas we are something like finishg fourth 
year of its development. It was promissed long time ago, that there 
will be most of the R3 to be open-sourced. It did not happened yet, 
and some ppl might question, if it will ever happen.


The other group, properly and daily following R3 development, asks 
for patience, as we are really close. Latest Twitter message as well 
as month update shows, that Carl is working on Host code, in order 
to be released to few developers. Carl also reported succesfull separation 
of kernel and host two days ago.

So ... make up your own conclusion :-)

Chris - yes, we missed probably many oportunities - no apache module, 
'call and 'dll not being in free versions of R2 for so long time, 
slow development, bad deployment to other infrastructures, no open-source, 
bugs ...

IMHO things have the highest chance of missing the trends by being 
locked / guarded too much / self contained and not "out there"

R3 architecture tries to adress all of those issues. It is a new 
start. There is no REBOL (many ppl out there never heard of it) out 
there, so we might have some impact. The thing is, that there is 
many open-source maniacs, who will dismiss the product just because 
it is not open-sourced. I have some friends, who cry for open-sourced 
solutions, yet they are not able to fix C code ... fanatics ...

Petr, there are still plenty of opportunities to be missed.

such people are still not in majority .. Java was free but not opensourced 
and people were using it, built other languages on top of JVM ..etc

there must be a practical openess IMHO and that is very important, 
but exact licence of the kernell does not worry me

Chris - what do you mean?

If I were in te youg days when I did many things for the sake of 
it I would love to help with peripherials  R3, play with it etc .. 
but I am strictly coding to make something in this period and so 
so far R2 is the only R I can be interested in for now

I know we need some Marketing plan, new website, etc. Carl is deeply 
thinking about those issues. The trouble is - how to make development 
any faster? Extensions will help. Would fully open-sourcing R3 magically 
bring many new developers? I doubt it. So what to do? A killer app? 
Which one?


We are "fighting" almost lost battle - Flash, Silverlight - even 
those will fight with AJAX and web stuff.

The best thing would probably be to "use them" to our advantage. 
Web plugin is imo still strategic product, that will lower the barrier 
to give REBOL apps a try. Then we can see, if we can make some VID 
to web compiler ....

the biggest general opurtunity these days for language is good concurrency 
/ multicore stuff .  GUI is moving to browser, but REBOL can do a 
lot (or more) on the server side / logic / bots ... etc

Petr, you can fix all the things that we did not do right in the 
past and that will be good. The question is, are we anticipating 
the next wave or still trying to catch the last one?

Which wave? General technological one?

in the long run .. the flash / silverlight and other plugins might 
not survive.. it seems consensus is now to put video / canvas / even 
GL in the browser.. so "out of browser" experience will have less 
and less relevance in the browser.