[REBOL] Personal Programming and Rebol Promotion
From: nick1:musiclessonz at: 16-Dec-2007 13:21
Hello Everyone,
I've been actively watching the Rebol community for several years, but
generally keeping my mouth shut for the most part (except for writing
the tutorials at http://musiclessonz.com/rebol_tutorial.html and
http://musiclessonz.com/rebol.html). I'm not a Rebol guru, but I do
use it regularly, and rely on it for critical computing activities in
my life. All of my daily business operations rely on Rebol scripts
(and several significant apps) that I've written over the years.
Rebol has repeatedly satisfied all of my needs, and I wrote my
tutorials a few years ago because Rebol had a enormous positive impact
on my productivity, and I wanted to share the possibilities I'd
discovered with others who were potentially in my situation.
I've never considered myself a really knowledgeable coder, even though
I've been involved with computers personally for almost 3 decades and
worked in the industry for 8 years (mostly in IT service, I owned
several retail stores, and did some successful work in the web
development industry in the late 90's). I make my living in the music
industry, but still use Rebol regularly. To me, it seems obvious that
Rebol's greatest strengths are perfectly suited to people like me.
It's a uniquely productive and useful tool for those who aren't
programmers
, and I feel a strong need to communicate my perspective
and positive hopes to this group, and to RT. It's been bothering me
for years :)
I learned C-64 assembler as a pre-teen, studied Lisp and C in college,
completed commercial work in VB, PHP, PERL, etc... Some of the code I
wrote 10 years ago still plays a critical role in the significant
daily commercial operations of a company for whom I developed software
solutions. But even with that, I never considered myself a real
programmer
. I mostly write scripts to satisfy my own personal and
professional needs, to help me stay organized, and to manage daily
operations in my music instruction business, and on my web sites. For
my needs, I LOVE Rebol. It serves as my desktop development solution,
as the scripting language for my online needs, and I even use it to
manage data on my new Pocket PC (Windows Mobile) phone.
It seems to me that the benefit of Rebol's strengths have been missed
or misunderstood by the world - even by Carl and RT. Rebol's
strengths lie in its simplicity, right? I keep coming back to it
again and again because it's just so freakin' easy to use and so
productive. I'm frankly stumped by why that point isn't at the heart
of every marketing message from RT, and a basis for use among this
community. It seems instead that Rebol has tried to best other
competing development environments...
I've been watching the mailing list, Carl's blog, and other Rebol
channels for a number of months, fully aware of the sense that Rebol
has reached some sort of "dying" point - a point at which it seems
obvious that our community has basically been left behind by the
mainstream industry. I guess that must have to do with the upcoming
release of R3 - it's easier for everyone to think of R2 as past
history, and to consider the idea of having newer, better things to
look forward to. But I've been watching for years, thinking that
Rebol is missing it's niche - a niche for which it's already PERFECT.
A niche for which it seems to have been created, but to which it
doesn't seem to have been targeted in terms of marketing and
promotion, even in the most basic way...
To me it seems that Rebol is the perfect language for use by "common
man". Not for developers, but for average computer users who want to
use their computers for personal needs. People buy commercial
applications to suit their needs - operating systems, web browsers,
financial management packages, and such software products do their
main computing work. Most average people will never consider writing
a browser application from scratch - that's pointless. But everyone -
everyone - would like to have more control of their own digital world.
Computing devices have taken on a central role in the lives of most
humans. To understand and be able to do simple personalized things
with those devices, to be able to create little apps and scripts for
desktop machines, web sites, phones, etc. that are personally useful -
that's an interest I see in people all around me. There are numerous
scripting languages and development environments which enable that
possibility, but NONE that are as EASY and as VERSATILE as Rebol.
That's Rebol's strength. It's easy enough for AVERAGE PEOPLE to learn
and use productively, right away. As it exists right now, in R2,
there's nothing else I've found that holds a candle to it in terms of
combining ease and SCOPE of use. That's why I love it. Rebol's not
perfectly suited to every development need - nothing is - but it's
easy to use and it works to satisfy so much of the scope of common use
that average people may experience.
It seems to me that RT and this community have always been focused on
making Rebol more perfect and acceptable to other developers. I don't
see that happening, and I think it misses the boat anyway. From my
perspective, it seems so clear that Rebol should be presented to a
much larger group of AVERAGE computer users. To enable a simple
solution for computing among the masses. Rebol may not ever compete
with the likes of Python and other scripting languages whose designs
are made to satisfy the existing expectations of the professional
programming crowd. There will always be shifts and trends in the
commercial development arena, based on the need to stay in line with
the most popular design trends. Rebol may not be in line with those
trends, but it embodies something much more useful to average users:
a dialecting design that makes simple work of complex tasks. To me,
it makes sense that this is the key for average computer users.
Immediately accessible power, with a simplicity that's unmatched
anywhere else. That's Rebol's niche. That may not appeal to
professional "programmers" who are entrenched in mainstream trends and
group work requirements, but I believe there is a much bigger
community of "normal" people who want something more natural in terms
of controlling their computers, which I really believe is what Rebol
provides.
I believe that there is an enormous community of people who don't know
that something like Rebol even exists, let alone that they might want
or need it. Most people have the sense that coding of any sort is
just something they'd never want to touch. It seems to me that Rebol
was designed to speak to those people, and not just to provide some
sort of easy teaching language experience, but to actually scale into
productive use. It seems to me that perfecting that scalability has
maybe become the focus of RT, and is certainly an interest of
professionals among this community. But to me, it seems blindingly
obvious that if we want a bigger community, and a healthy Rebol
future, we should be focused on evangelizing to average users, so they
can see the light and the potential personal benefits of this
fantastically versatile little computing tool. I think it's possible
to attract an enormous crowd of average people - regular computer
users - for whom Rebol can actually make a significant difference in
life. For those people, current and historical language trends don't
matter at all, and Rebol is already great as it exists in its current
state.
I've recently been making videos of my absolute beginners tutorial,
just to walk people through the text in a way that's more likely to be
accessed, on YouTube. The videos are very quickly improvised, they're
not at all well produced, and not very well spoken (lot's of "um"s and
ah
s), but they're the kind of thing I would've loved to have had
when I was learning Rebol (I really enjoyed watching video
presentations from previous years of Devcon - watching video is just
more fun and accessible than reading text). So far, I've uploaded 62
videos, about 8 hours of clips. Those 8 hours provide a real intro to
Rebol for average people, and they're getting watched (with probably
more realistic, interested views from people in the outside world than
the web site has received).
I'd love to see a realization occur among this community, and at RT,
that there's still some absolutely enormous potential for Rebol. I
think Rebol has a phenomenally useful niche among the biggest crowd of
computer users around the world - average people. I think it's even
conceivable that Rebol could potentially become a popular mainstream
application among average users, just because it's so astoundingly
useful, and so dramatically simple to use. If promotional efforts
were made to open peoples' eyes simply to its existence, and to the
potential it enables in the experience of the average computer user, I
think Rebol could be the outstanding success it deserves to be.
I'm going to continue to do what I can, and hope that others,
especially RT, may see Rebol's potential for use among average users,
from THEIR perspective, and put the necessary energy into promoting
with that perspective in mind. We all know Rebol is great, and I
think there are many, many other people who may not have ever
considered even looking at a "programming language" who may think it's
great too, if they just knew that it existed, and understood what they
could do if they looked into it. My 2 cents is that the efforts of RT
and this community shouldn't be focused on appealing to existing
programmers, but rather to exposing the idea and the potential of
personal programming
to average users.
I hope this doesn't come off as some wackadoo rambling post - I'd just
love to see the Rebol community grow, and become useful to others, the
way it's been useful to me :) I see the idea of exposing Rebol to the
mainstream user crowd, and promoting the idea of personal programming
with Rebol (with the same flair that Apple presents MAC as a sleek
solution, for example), as a plausible path to creating significant
success for Rebol. I have some more specific ideas, if anyone's
interested...
