[REBOL] Re: REBOL 3.0 mentioned on the blog!
From: carl::cybercraft::co::nz at: 13-Mar-2006 22:56
On Sunday, 12-March-2006 at 13:52:45 Nick Antonaccio wrote,
>Beyond that, I hope RT really works at marketing. A bigger community means a
>more productive and capable language via more third party tools. That's
>where
>Rebol's really lacking. No one uses it. Carl and many of the Rebol gurus
>are
>design geniuses - my sense is that they should devote more of their energy
>and
>vision to promoting the superior design of Rebol, and making it commercially
>acceptable to use it! Success in that area would be success for everyone
>involved :)
I agree. A re-write of REBOL to add new features would be nice if it's a success, but
I see no reason to suspect it will be, given the amount of unfinished REBOL stuff that's
about. The Mac View version is still "pending" on their website, though in alpha or
beta if you look deeply. And REBOL Services? It's still in alpha or beta too I believe,
as is Rebcode. And the REBOL plugin is still only on IE.
I'm worried that while they're trying to make REBOL perfect, the world's leaving them
far behind.
I wasn't going to comment on this thread, but then I read this from Dave Winer...
http://www.scripting.com/2006/03/13.html#whyIWillStopBlogging
---8<---
When I started blogging, depending on how you look at it, either in 1994, 1996 or 1997,
I had different goals, and happily the goals have been accomplished. Billions of Websites
now no longer seems an outrageously ambitious goal. We're pretty close to a billion,
I suspect. The goal was also to create tools that would make it easy for everyone to
have a site, and then more specifically a chronological one. That's done.
I wanted programming to turn upside down, to have the Internet be the platform instead
of Microsoft and Apple. That worked too. APIs on web apps are now commonplace, and a
basis for comparison between offerings. While user interfaces have gotten better, of
course, there's been a steady flow of new ideas in how my work connects with yours, and
vice versa, and we're doing it without a platform vendor controlling it.
---8<---
That second paragraph's the important one. REBOL should be part of it and would be way
better than the horrible mix of stuff used to put an AJAX site together. It isn't though,
and I don't see how improving the core language will make it so. At the stage it is
now, it needs two (or perhaps three) things done: To have the plugin available for all
major browsers and platforms and for it to be promoted! (The third thing is going fully
open-source, but I'm unsure of just how much difference that would make.)
REBOL's promotion now is all "come to me". "Join AltME" instead of "plug this into your
existing website". Carl has a blog, but there's no public commenting allowed, so no
conversation takes place around it. You can just leave a message, which no one except
those at RT will see. The traffic's all going the wrong way, a black hole instead of
a sun.
Hee, and to prove my point, I've just searched Technorati. Just one REBOL hit in the
last three days, and this is it...
I just killed a couple of days reading Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants, which is a fascinating
account of a talented engineer spending a year searching for better languages, and finding
Lisp in the end. Lots of interesting insights -- I found his essays on practicing programming
and math every day to be particularly inspiring, since I've already found Lisp, and Ruby,
and OCaml, and Erlang, and pretty much all of the other languages that are mentioned.
Except Rebol. That one was new.
And having posted this, how do I link to it on the net if I want to point someone else
to it? Wait until it appears in the mailing-list archive, right? Trouble is, that doesn't
happen instantly - and sometimes not for a day or more. Which is usually after you've
moved on to something else. Which is no way to promote anything.
Umm - rant over. :-)
-- Carl Read.
