World: r3wp

(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.

Why not let Boron go its way instead of castigating it's existence, 
see if it opens doors that we do not expect.  Who's to say what is 
driving it forward...

Anyone is free to do what he wants, I am supporting only the official 
distro. In current situation it is the only thing which makes sense. 
There was several cloning attempts in the past, some of them raised 
some expectations, and they failed to be finished/released. I don't 
know why I should waste my time with another clone. I mean - each 
of us have our own jobs, and if I have some free time, I am going 
to devote it to official distro ...

Janko - I am not sure users do care nor distinguish, if some things 
runs as a plugin or as a JS app :-) It is just agenda of web developers, 
who try to kill stuff as Flash, Silverlight. R3's GUI might not be 
competition to web development, but it might have its place in some 
rich-apps development, embedded sphere, etc. I would not dismiss 
such potential ...

I have oppinion the winning "webapps" will be the ones that give 
the best in browser experience. Try using a whole website in flash 
/ silverlight and tell me if youwon't go mad.. riht click doesn't 
work , scroll buttons work strangely, open in new tab doesn't work, 
things don't float etc... it's not only about what's the best it's 
also about what behaves as people are used too (in the browser at 
least) . So IMHO inthis regard a REBOL to javascript compiler would 
be better :)

and if everything will mo to browser, even the webGL and stuff I 
surelly hope there will be some jitting bytecode standard to which 
javascript and other languages for browser could compile to

Janko, I agree - the web as a platform has endured all pretenders 
and is slowly and cumbersomely taking us forward. Flash for the most 
part is used as filler - for video containers, for 'interactivity' 
that is slowly being subsumed by html/css/js - but has always been 
an uncomfortable fit. HTML5 is, rightly or wrongly, the direction 
the web appears to be headed in.

yes, I agree, I am also not sure if it's good that html must do all 
+ video + canvas + gl but this is where it's moving

btw .. firefox js engine and webkit (safari) has intermediate "bytecode" 
representation (each their own) to which language can compile too.. 
it's bad that Google chrome doesn't follow this but jits directly 
from JS to native assembler.

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Nanojit/LIR

In saying that, MS is still in the mix. So long as IE has a large 
corporate presence, and developers rely on their APIs, they are still 
going to have some directional influence. I think they've been an 
anchor that the web platform has been dragging along.

yes, IE is heavilly in the mix :) and these are no signs that this 
stardardised bytecode will happen anytime soon

That might be a good thing though - a tempering influence, not letting 
others go down a wrong path too quickly (a la Netscape).

biodiversity  is the sign of a thriving ecosystem.