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I don't think Carl could have rasied that much but a well run campaign 
may well have been able to raise enough to set up a solid infrastructure 
for the REBOL 3 opn source project. I think 50,000 USD would be in 
reach.

It's actually pretty easy to see how they managed it. It was:

- A multi-language IDE (not a programming language, people already 
get those for free)
- With a GUI with an emphasis on modern graphic design (pretty!)
- With a fancy demo (more pretty!)

- With an initial focus on programming languages and development 
platforms that are already popular (built-in customer base)


Powerful IDEs are some of the only development tools that people 
are still willing to pay money for (i.e. Visual Studio). Most people 
can't choose what language they write in, but they more often can 
choose their IDE. And for crappy-but-IDE-friendly languages, an IDE 
can make all the difference in your productivity. They're not as 
helpful for really powerful extensible languages like Rebol or Perl, 
unless the language is so bad that just about anything would help 
(Perl). Plus, since an IDE is an end-user app you can afford to GPL 
it, since the only stuff built on it are add-ons - that doesn't work 
for programming languages unless they have a clear distinction between 
user code and built-in code that is distinct enough to not violate 
the GPL distinctions, because most of the competition is permissive 
- and without the GPL restrictions there is nothing to sell, so there 
is no business model to get a return on investment.


It's nice to point to other open source projects and say "See! We 
could have done that!" but unless those are comparable projects their 
success isn't comparable either.

And it doesn't take a lot to run a programming language charity for 
a somewhat minimalist language. You don't need a lot of people to 
get the job done. Something maximalist like .NET or Java (when you 
include their runtime libraries) can need a lot of people, but something 
small like Rebol or Red doesn't need as much. You can get enough 
people to fund development even for a charity project just by being 
useful enough.

LiveCode is not a multi-language IDE. The IDE supports one langauge 
LIveCode.which is a descendant of xTalk.

OK, so it's a single-language IDE aimed primarily at the education 
market, still with a nice-looking GUI if not as modern, with an appeal 
based on Apple-fan nostalgia for HyperCard. That's a tougher sell, 
but since it's education market you can get away with GPL/commercial, 
and since it's Apple-nostalgia you can raise that much money from 
merely thousands of investors instead of the millions that you'd 
need if you were going for a less-well-off target market. Makes sense, 
but it's still nice to see.

Livecode is a great tool - the values remind me a low  of what made 
REBOL attractive years ago.  It's just a really productive and well 
designed tool, easy to use, powerful, cross platform (iOS, Android, 
Windows, Mac, Linux, server), it's SIMPLE and geared towards getting 
work accomplished.  That's it's only goal, and the company has always 
tried to make good real-world choices about productivity.  And they're 
keeping the system modern and relevent.  The REBOL community would 
be helped by watching what they do...

Well, we can't follow their business model, but there is a lot of 
other stuff we can learn from them.

As good as REBOL is it could use a good IDE environment.  AmigaVision 
comes to mind.  I would be interested to see whether some large chunks 
of change were invested to put them over the top.  Right now R3 needs 
a message. What makes it special and valuable. What vision does it 
conjure up.

The business model incompatibility was the only criticism I had - 
the product looks good, with a lot we could learn from and possibly 
do better. I'm not a marketing guy though, just a social analyst, 
so I can't help on the message.

Kids, Non-Programmers, Entrepreneurs, other education markets - a 
lot of the same covered by Livecode, actually.

I think eduction is a great market for REBOL.  Net Logo actually 
did well in education.  If Education is the goal a great IDE is the 
place to start.  Something like a high quality layout.r or AmigaVision.

There you go - a potential income model.

Hypercard worked because it had a very simple IDE approach.  Power 
users became proficient at scripting and teachers shared their cards.

The approach needs to provide tools so easy you can layout an app 
as easily as making a powerpoint presentation, but with the power 
underneath to do absolutely anything.

In a classroom, imagine if the "powerpoint" allowed students to connect 
their smart phones to the presentation and control aspects of a weather 
simulation, or control a point on a Cartesian coordinate plane.  
The trick is to make this so easy to do that teachers can do it like 
they make power points.

Styles like a Cartesian plane could be added as someone makes them. 
 This is how hypercard became so popular.  People used hypercard 
who never made a card of thier own.

That's analagous to using a dialect.

Yes it is.  Now we're getting a bit technical in a learning sciences 
sense.  One of the things that makes a classroom such a rich learning 
environment is the presence of resources that mediate learning. They 
provide a medium through which learning activities can take place.

I think a little funding would go a long, long way towards bringing 
REBOL back up to speed, and back into a relevant and competitive 
position.

Powerpoint is one of those things that really doesn't do much mediating 
because it lacks interaction.  All it needs is a REBOL back end to 
connect the students and make it interactive, especially if it can 
also be used in small groups.

REBOL provides a NATURAL LANGUAGE medium. We just need some tools 
to leverage it.  Microsoft has Office.  Maybe REBOL needs Classroom.

Yes, and a REBOL back end would make the next "tougher" layer easier 
to dig into.

The livecode guys are working towards understanding the "natural 
language" idea, but they're a long way from achieving what Carl already 
accomplished with REBOL.

Like Hypercard, the App becomes a "window" into the language.  AltME 
has this potential, Presenter.r had this potential, Layout.r has 
this potential.

I had funding for an ISP business model for RT, not a direction they 
wanted to go.  I also successfuly pitched the Internet Operating 
System Idea to a major ISP, again RT wanted to go in a different 
direction.  I have discussed the Classroom idea before but never 
been able to pitch it.

BrianH, you would and should be a god there!

RT made terrible marketing and business decisions.  There is absolutely 
no reason why REBOL shouldn't be a big success.  RT just didn't make 
it happen.

I could be in a position quite soon to revive discussions about Classroom. 
 Local WiFi distributed network.

RT Partly didn't, but also partly couldn't.  There were customers 
to support making it hard to take on big players, even if with a 
possibily high ROI.

Well, that's where Rebol was getting all their money so I suppose 
it seemed like a great idea at the time.

The people chosen at the critical stage to run the company were not 
a good fit, unfortunately.

A lot of people said a lot of stuff on both sides. And I meant die 
on a societal level, not just for RT. And I meant back before 2000. 
A lot of people thought they knew stuff back then, but most of that 
knowledge was really belief. For one thing, back then people in the 
free software camp thought free software would succeed because of 
principles - very few knew that those principles would be irrelevant 
and that practical considerations would make it succeed for other 
reasons.

Agreed.  So I still have quite a few ideas, though my funding sources 
have long since disappeared.

I am working on making a business model.  If I can get it started, 
I can help get funding.

Fortunately one pivot that has shown some success lately in these 
cases lately has been the switch from a commercial entity to an industry-backed 
non-commercial project. That has worked for a lot of languages. Since 
that is basically what Carl did, I hope it works for us too.

Not open source - just a simple business.

I'm thinking of a product that empowers enyone who needs to teach 
anything.

More clearly, create a technologically empowered learning environment.

I'm thinking more of a specific tool/s

JN: I think there will be a key tool around which it all revolves, 
like Hypercard.

Write a business plan, write a business plan, write a business plan

Right.  I'm writing a disseration...

Writing a business plan is faster.

I will need a job in July.

Yes Brian, all that matters is that things get *done for a good price.

My Ph.D. gives me a seat at the table in education conversations, 
so there are possibilities....

Thanks for taking this up NickA, james_nak, BrianH.  Teacher tools 
in a Classroom Suite.  I have a friend in high places.  I'll pitch 
it and see what he says.

So this discussion is allowing me to synthesize some ideas that might 
be workable.  Perhaps a symbiotic sort of relationship like Stanford 
and Xeorox park for educational technology.  I'm up for a faculty 
spot in So Cal.  Fingers crossed.

Yup. We don't have a clue, to be honest. We talk about learning environments 
but we dont' really know what they are and how they work very well. 
Still stuck in reductionist thinking.

Bottomline, better teachers, who use assessment a tool to support 
learning = good education.

They are learning how the test works.  Kids are great a learning.

If you want to know what is going on in a classroom, ask the students. 
 If you want to know what is really going on for a student, ask the 
teacher.  If the teacher doesn't know, get a different teacher.

I need a lot of oil these days. Scot, I am glad to see that you're 
still ticking and doing well.

Subscriptions work only at the district level.  That is a long difficult 
sales cycle and you need to get a 5 year commitment.  Sales of a 
product works at the classroom and school site level.

I am a learning scientist (and really always have been) so my interest 
in from the perpective of the learner and the community of learners. 
 This has put me at odds with administrators and teachers at times.

Scot, are you a boat rocker?

So for me learning is "relating" in a particular way to an idea. 
 Much like the habits you mention.  Part of that relationship is 
how much it matters fo the learner to be engaged.

I think we carry "ways of relating" with us into various contexts 
and situations.  Taking interest is a way of relating.

Um...a bit of unexpected behavior here on the Linux ARM version of 
R3:

>> 6.63 / 59
== 0.

>> 6.63 / 59.0
== 4.

Neither are correct.

Is this an R3 bug or feature? Duplicate word in a single object....

    ob: object [] append ob  [b: 2 b: 3 b: 4]
    == make object! [
        b: 2
        b: 3
        b: 4
    ]


    foreach w words-of ob [print get w]   ;; they are actually different
    2
    3
    4

that HAS to be a bug.

@GrahamC: Thanks A LOT for prot-smtp.r and prot-send.r.  I was able 
to send an email from R3, but only after changing a line from:

	ehlo: any [ port/spec/ehlo "rebol3 user pc" ]
to
	ehlo: any [ port/spec/ehlo port/spec/email ]

My smtp server was throwing a 501 5.0.0 Invalid domain name

I tried to find a submitted bug in Curecode, but couldn't find one, 
so I submitted one.

The rebolbot has a multiline console :)

More prot-send.r testing.  Had the hardest time trying to get 'send 
to work with my mail server.  Found I had to change a line in prot-send.r 
to :


 smtp-port: [ scheme: 'smtp host: (user/smtp) user: (user/user) pass: 
 (user/pass) ehlo: (find/tail user/email 
@
) timeout: 600 ]


as EHLO on my SMTP host was expecting only the domain portion of 
the email address instead of the entire email address which is what 
I had been trying.

Windows has a gethostname API. I always liked the read dns:// feature 
though.

RANDOM help: "Pick a random value from a series" . The text looks 
a bit inaccurate to me. Wouldn't one of:

Randomly pick a value from a series

or

Pick a value from a series at random


For me, these reflect more accurately what is random. Any opinions?

I understand what Ladislav is saying.  The current text implies that 
there is a series of random values, and one will be picked.

Or it could mean that there is a series, and one of the values will 
be picked randomly.

What was wrong with the R2 text?

  "Return single value from series."


But the doc string for 'value isn't helpful with regard to series 
values either.

I would make it a bit more readable though.

  Return a single value from the series.

Should have a comma:


value -- Maximum value of result, or series (modified when series)

Moving from the 'random topic back to prot-send.r, I found a somewhat 
serious bug with attachments and base-64 encoding.  I sent the exact 
same attachment using webmail and R3.


at position 32677 in the email sent by webmail (the headers are slighly 
different sizes and the base-64 line breaks are different between 
the two clients) we have the following data:


eMHgCm4jUznXtDnpVKaErkAc107QbjVC6siyHYBu96hxLUjnXDKeWqPOTzVmWxuUY7kJ+lRGF16x

tn6VmO4ncYpZX34HYU0qw7EU3afSgdyUKCvy1s6DpEN3doL93jtyD9089Caq6bZO0g3Llj0Wu8t9

OhsNDu7uUK9wYiq/7OeOK1p03Mwq1eXRbnnUVuZJcKCecD3rctbVbYjdy5/Si1ks7WTLyAerYzUH


at position 32521 in the email sent by R3, we have the following 
data:


vaHNtZYHTmoHtcDpXRSQDk1UeMHgCm4jUznXtDnpVKaErkAc107QbjVC6siyHYBu96hxLUjn
XDKeWq

doL93jtyD9089Caq6bZO0g3Llj0Wu8t9OhsNDu7uUK9wYiq/7OeOK1p03Mwq1eXRbnnUVuZJ


I copied the three lines of data around where the problem occurs. 
 On the short line in the R3 data, the following sequence is missing:


POTzVmWxuUY7kJ+lRGF16xtn6VmO4ncYpZX34HYU0qw7EU3afSgdyUKCvy1s6DpEN3


You can imagine the kind of trouble that causes with binary data. 
;-)

Before delving deep into R3 code, does anyone have any knowledge 
or idea of why this is happening?  Could it be a problem with buffer 
allocation around the 32K boundary?

Example (allow me to be a bit "unreasonable"):

random/seed 0
block: reduce [1 2 random 100] ; == [1 2 31] (in R3)


now being ordered "Pick a random value from BLOCK" I may (not very 
intelligently, I know) expect that I am required to pick 31 because 
that is the only random value in there (absurd, but compatible with 
the text, as I see it)

While being ordered "Pick a value from BLOCK at random", I would 
just pick whatever I like

I am not a native speaker, though, (but Bo understood my concern, 
I think), so I may be wrong when interpreting the sentences.

I like "Pick a value from a series at random" because the potential 
ambiguity would be whether any value is picked at all, which you 
could say always happens in some other docs if you feel it to be 
necessary to resolve the ambiguity.

So, maybe it wasn't a good idea to suggest a change, I am not sure

You can throw more words at the problem to try to make things less 
ambiguous, but that doesn't always work and tends to make your speech 
patterns a little off-putting or overbearing. Some people don't take 
well to overly-precise English. You have to balance things.

I am not writing a ticket for it, then, since it looks like not needing 
an improvement.

So R3 on Windows works fine.  It seems to be a problem related to 
R3 Arm.

Yes, I create a 32Kb buffer to send files in parts

How about writing to a file and sending to the port and seeing if 
there's a difference ...

Has this been discussed as an R2/R3 change? in R2 the variable used 
in a FOR is hard to mess with:
     for nn 1 5 1 [prin nn nn: 3]
    12345
     for nn 1 5 1 [prin nn unset 'nn]
     12345

But in R3:
     for nn 1 5 1 [prin nn nn: 3]
     144444444444444444444444444444444444444 <esc>
     for nn 1 5 1 [prin nn unset 'nn]
     1** Script error: unset! type is not allowed here

No views on this at all.....Just noticed it as a difference and wondered 
if it was a principle or an accident.

@Robert - do you think Saphirion could put up a newer source download 
if publishing to a repo is not going to happen in the near future?

a newer download or the public repo?

(in the form of a new public repo)

You should not understand it so that we discussed the FOR loop behaviour 
- I demonstrated the typecheck necessity on a different example, 
which Carl noted and used in the FOR case as well.

Also, in my opinion REPEAT is a special case of FOR and note that 
in R3 REPEAT and FOR are compatible, which is not the case in R2.

Pekr: "BrianH:I don't believe a single second for R3 becoming even 
beta. Three or so years ago I wrote, what makes a good beta for me. 
So here it comes - give me a console, not a crap. Give me smtp, ftp 
etc schemes, without an excuse. Give us odbc, mysql, postgress, give 
us CALL. So - no matter how much advanced R3 is to R2, in a sence 
of a complete package, it is still pre-alpha ..."

The one thing I don't agree with is "give us". It's a community project 
now, for real this time. There is no "give us", we give it to ourselves.

But you are talking about very high-level features. R3 is designed 
to be modular, so most things that need to be built-in features in 
R2, should be add-on modules or extensions in R3, even the ones that 
we include by default. And some of what you request has been started 
already, such as the database stuff which ChristianE started, and 
I have been using every day for more than a year.

But yes, we need more schemes (also in included-by-default modules) 
and a decent CALL, agreed.

And a better console, built on R3-GUI. And better text-mode console 
support for systems where you can't use a GUI.

BrianH: well, I was long time a proponent of R3. What attracted me 
most were devices, even more modularity, etc. But - let's not be 
deluded. If you are careful enough, you could see, that ppl mention 
some things here or in regards to Red, eg. asking - is View going 
to be available? Let's not ingore, that many ppl started to use REBOL, 
because it was kind of complete package - console, call, dbases, 
networking, gui ...

Still, all of that can be added on or retrofitted, that's the whole 
point of being modular. Having them implemented and available before 
3.0 would be a good idea for marketing reasons (don't knock those, 
they're important), but not having them done before 3.0 won't break 
user code the way not doing core semantic changes before 3.0 would. 
People will be working on these before 3.0 comes out because they 
need them, and the ones that we as a community consider to be the 
most important to include in 3.0 will likely be worked on the most. 
But the great part about that stuff is that it doesn't have to be 
developed as part of R3 itself, just like the GUI is being developed 
separately.

Personally, I want to work on the database support because that is 
what I need the most and have the most experience with. I expect 
that others will need networking stuff more, and yet others will 
need CALL or a better console.

I'm not a C developer, so I don't feel like I can do much to add 
to the sources of R3.  However, what attracts me to Rebol, and what 
makes me want to use Rebol, is that I can do just about anything 
with relative ease.