World: r3wp

and plugin is now...

bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush

well, sort-of-now :-)

we don't know what bugs R3 will introduce

many of us will stick to R2 unti we see how stable R3 is ...

right, but it would be easier if there was someone other than JoshM 
to keep the plugin fire going.

Graham may be right, unless R3 shows sometimes in two months or so. 
It is already one month late anyway, blog is filled mainly with rhetoric 
questions, to which decision is never announced .... so it is kind 
of worrying ;-)

I need the plugin badly for some commercial projects and they can't 
go anywhere without a production ready plugin. But we all know that 
REBOL development tends to go in the "ohh... shiny" direction. :-)

we are comforted with the notion that everything will fall into place 
once R3 comes out.

hmm, I think Carl is responsible though, not Josh .....

but maybe Josh could beta-release here without Carl's permission? 
So no on the web, but here? I bet there is just few bugs remaining, 
which prevent from plug-in usage ...

JoshM, don't want to ruin anything, but you could tell Carl that 
there were objections to this shift :-)

it seems you guys had something in concrete planning for the plug-in, 
right?

I had something in mind that would be used by thousands of customers 
potentially. I've been waiting for almost two years to implement 
it. That has to be implemented by someone else in AJAX now.

hmm, that is bad ...

but maybe that is how RT works with community? :-)

it still does not seem to work - communication is lacking ... Carl 
isolated himself (although it is understandable, he wants to fully 
concentrate), but although Gabriele tries to be helpfull, RT QA channel 
does not work. I bet Carl did not know about your plans, so the fault 
is on both sides ...

it would just work a lot better if there were more people assigned 
to easier tasks and something that would be officially recognized. 
does RT themselves have to maintain docs and site? why do I have 
to wait 2 months to see a typo in a document fixed when I could do 
this myself?

that is kind of general communication problem, and Gabriele should 
discuss it with Carl once he is back. Carl announced he want more 
involvement of community, yet the channels are closed from RT's side 
.....

we are for example still lacking proper documentation for VID. there 
are still many secrets in it. A knowledgable person could write it, 
some one else could proof read it and make suggestions about documentation 
flow and Carl could comment on it and have the final say. But if 
I know Carl right, he's very hands-on, wants to do it himself. :-)

I talk about docs, because, at least I document my products...

I appreciate your comments....first off, I will forward them to Carl.

joshM, it's not your fault. you are doing a heck of a job.

Regarding the temporary hold on plugin development  -- you'll have 
to talk to him. But, I can tell you, that we want to make both the 
plugin and REBOL 3 as great as possible. In this case, there are 
some crucial things in REBOL 3 that we need to improve and those 
take priority.

But, regarding your needs for the plugin now.....I'm sure we can 
get some of these crucial bugs fixed.

The Win2k issue is serious...I didn't realize it was completely broken. 
We'll take a look at that. The only thing is that Carl is in France 
and I can't release w/o him, so it will probably have to wait untill 
he gets back in 3 weeks.

that's ok for me. I don't need it tomorrow, but it would be nice 
to develop my concepts for demoing in a few months time.

In the meantime, if you have any other crucial breaking bugs, please 
post them. (also, regarding stability: please try the plugin on a 
fresh, clean system first, because old plugin versions can sometimes 
mess things up).

Graham: "How can anyone plan anything ??"

Henrik: "I had something in mind... I've been waiting for almost 
two years to implement ..."
Pekr: "that is kind of general communication problem..."

JoshM: "Regarding the temporary hold on plugin development  -- you'll 
have to talk to him"


Those are  reasons  why I move towards Orca, and I now moving towards 
other languages, until Orca is mature, you can't bet your future 
on Rebol, because over and over again things stay the same with little 
glimpses of hope that comes from small announcements, but not real 
change.

How amazing it is that Rebol has lost ground an oportunities, and 
every other language is developing and making progress at an incredible 
pace.

jaimevargas, well I sure hope that Orca will deliver

because it _will_ _most_ _certainly_ deliver, won't it? :-)

I am not sure Orca will deliver, as Rebol lost momentum already, 
and unless Orca attracts new developers (which is imo unlikely), 
it is a tough problem. I wonder Kaj bets on Orca for Syllable.

Until there is a change in RT in rebol polices rebol is going to 
lose market and mind share, and it risk being completely isolated, 
like it happen to Apple before to OSX, or scheme before PLT, or Smalltalk 
before seaside, or Ruby before rails. We need a push for real.

Yeah, you know the cure - open source. The rest hoped for RT's plan 
to keep the kernel, but release the rest. I wonder, why plug-in, 
which is completly unrelated to Rebol itself, was not released as 
open sourced ...

Jaime - so what is your environment of choice for the future being? 
Is that a Python?

Yes not many people willing to contribute to Orca, the sad thing 
is that I know of at least 3 more complete clones that have not been 
delivered due authors wish. So Rebol is quite fragmented. And all 
the hopeshare goes to RT. I wish people could gather around just 
one code base, and work like many other comunities, but there is 
something here holding people back.

author wish = Carl?

Nope different authors.

Karl Robillard is the only one that has come out with an actual viable 
clone, and the only one that keeps coding in the open and sharing.

ah, I don't understand them then. Why so? Maybe because they don't 
want hurt RT? The question is, what is hurting the situation more 
:-)

If RT would deliver on their plans, that there would be no objections, 
but :-) Did not know there are other full clones. I knew of one, 
but not three of them :-)

Pekr, my development  choices are:
Cross Platform Stand Alone Apps -> PLT-Scheme
Web Apps -> Ruby-on-Rails
OSX only Apps -> Cocoa or F-Script.

anyway - why not to open plug-in itself? Wasn't it said, that RT 
will keep the kernel, and the rest, including the concole, most parts 
of View, will be open-sourced?

PLT - never heard of that ...

Could not Ruby be used for stand alone apps too?

Who knows, just like we don't understand any of the decisions or 
unkept promises. (We waited how long for OSX-SDK? How long for async, 
etc. So many promises, so little delivered).

I wonder why Python is missing - cross platform, really cross platform, 
including small devices, .Net, very large community, lots of tools 
around, etc.

Pekr, Ruby and stand alone yes. But packaging is not as easy as PLT-Scheme, 
which just gives you a single binary like rebol.

(That ends my ranting, Orca still has a chance if anyone time please 
feel welcome to contribute, I sign-off from this channel now)