[REBOL] Re: Carl ar Rebol, comment please :-) (was) Re: Re: languageshoot-out :-
From: joel::neely::fedex::com at: 5-Nov-2002 10:35
Hi, Petr, Carl, and all,
Petr Krenzelok wrote:
...
> maybe Carl could organise a poll to see, what would developer's
> welcome most in the next few months, year, two years period. My
> favorites are (in no respective order):
>
...
> profi (Command nad Pro?):
> - threading support
> - tail recursion (for Joel :-)
Hmmm. Thanks for thinking of me (;-) but this is *not* on my list
of requests. At my current (but still evolving, of course ;_)
level of understanding, I view tail recursion elimination to be
incompatible with the design philosophy of REBOL. AFAIK TRE requires
either:
1) Code rewriting at "compile time" to replace what the programmer
expressed with something equivalent but faster/cheaper/etc.
or
2) Expression inspection by the interpreter at "run time" to allow the
interpreter to determine dynamically how to do something equivalent
but faster/cheaper/etc.
The problem with (1) is that the concepts in which it is stated just
don't exist in REBOL AFAICT. There's no difference between "code" and
data
, there's no "compile time", and e.g. the body of a function is
still expected to be a valid REBOL block (although with new context).
The problem with (2) is that it's expensive (unless enough use is
made to amortize the inspection overhead) and incompatible with the
totally dynamic character of REBOL.
FWIW, my list would probably (not well thought out) contain items
such as:
- Documentation.
- Mac OS X support equivalent to other platforms.
- Documentation.
- Addressing some of the performance and consistency issues already
raised on this list (to ease effective learning for beginners and
effective use by not-so-beginners).
- Documentation.
Some folks may wonder about my rating Mac OS X so highly (yeah... I've
read the how-to-set-priorities discussions over the years). First, in
the interest of full disclosure, my main personal box now is an iBook,
and I tend to restrict myself to tools that I can use on all of the
platforms I routinely use (Mac OS X, wxx, Solaris, Linux). However,
let me point out another issue here, that is not just my personal
preference:
Many Unix-/Linux-oriented publications are paying increased attention
to the OS X environment, and increasinly describing it at the best of
both
worlds: a Unix system "under the hood" but with a nice end-
user-oriented GUI for those suffering from commandlinephobia. I'm
seeing more articles written by or for serious Unix/Linux geeks that
are very favorable to OS X.
Yesterday I was in the local Apple store talking to the tech guy, and
he observed that they've had quite a number of programmers to come in
and pick up OS X laptops to use for Java development.
I respectfully suggest that presence on OS X would serve as a way to
get ahead of the curve
on a platform that seems to be increasingly
well-regarded by a couple of important communities (*nix and Java),
rather than waiting to see where the masses are and playing catch up.
Just my $0.02 ...
-jn-
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Joel Neely joelDOTneelyATfedexDOTcom 901-263-4446
