[REBOL] Re: MIT article on rebol and other languages
From: joel:neely:fedex at: 18-Feb-2002 6:04
Hi, Rishi,
Rishi Oswal wrote:
> Hi. I didn't see it mentioned. But here is a nice
> article on "Lightweight Languages." There is a
> paragraph on rebol with some insights from Joe
> Marshall (main implementor of first version of
> rebol..or so the article says..)
>
> It classifies languages like python and perl as "worse
> is better" languages and rebol as "a classic case of
> the right thing."
>
In the context of Rich Gabriel's writing, that's not really
the compliment some would think, and it's also not clear to
me how accurate it currently is (he was talking about
version 1.0, which is outside my experience).
Note that Perl developer Dan Sugalski's wisecrack about
not understanding continuations was taken as evidence that
Worse Is Better
communities are ignorant of computing
science. (The concept of continuation occurs nowhere that
I've found in REBOL documentation nor practice.) Also,
there was the comment in the article:
Marshall also added that many of the features in the
first version of REBOL were omitted in the second,
including his tail-recursion implementation.
That was an interesting footnote, given that tail recursion
is a bit of a sacred cow to "The Right Thing" mentality.
A language that does "The Right Thing" is described by these:
---<begin excerpt>---
* Simplicity -- the design must be simple, both in implementation
and interface. It is more important for the interface to be
simple than the implementation.
* Correctness -- the design must be correct in all observable
aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.
* Consistency -- the design must not be inconsistent. A design is
allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid
inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
* Completeness -- the design must cover as many important situations
as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered.
Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.
----<end excerpt>----
A language based on "Worse Is Better" is described by these:
---<begin excerpt>---
* Simplicity -- the design must be simple, both in implementation
and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be
simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important
consideration in a design.
* Correctness -- the design must be correct in all observable
aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.
* Consistency -- the design must not be overly inconsistent.
Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but
it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with
less common circumstances than to introduce either
implementational complexity or inconsistency.
* Completeness -- the design must cover as many important situations
as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered.
Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In
fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation
simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve
completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is
consistency of interface.
----<end excerpt>----
In conversational usage, I hear "worse is better" used as the
equivalent of "pragmatic, theoretically impure/indifferent, but
popular", and "the right thing" as equivalent to "idealistic,
theoretically pure/consistent, but marginal".
Draw your own conclusions.
-jn-
--
; sub REBOL {}; sub head ($) {@_[0]}
REBOL []
# despam: func [e] [replace replace/all e ":" "." "#" "@"]
; sub despam {my ($e) = @_; $e =~ tr/:#/.@/; return "\n$e"}
print head reverse despam "moc:xedef#yleen:leoj" ;
