[REBOL] Re: What does REBOL fix?
From: gedb01::yahoo at: 16-Dec-2003 16:59
Hi Joel,
--- Joel Neely <[joel--neely--fedex--com]> wrote: >
> I disclaim all knowledge re PHP, but here's a
> trivial Perl client
> to fetch and execute/evaluate source from a remote
> host.
>
> use LWP::Simple;
> eval get ("http://your-site-here");
>
> I guess one has to decide whether a one-line summary
> for REBOL (or any other language) is to be:
>
Looking at it again, the challange was "to describe
[the language] in terms of the problem it fixes." [1]
This is very different from a marketing slogan. For
example, the one-liner for lisp is
Lisp: Turing Machines are an awkward way to describe
computation.
This seems an awkward way to describe Lisp, but it
probably does reflect the motivation of John McCarthy
back in the 1960s.
Rebol's creator has expressed the problem that Rebol
is intended to fix quite clearly on the Rebol web
site:
REBOL is not a traditional computer language like C,
BASIC, or Java. Instead, REBOL was designed to solve
one of the fundamental problems in computing: the
exchange and interpretation of information between
distributed computer systems.
The ultimate goal of REBOL is to provide a new
architecture for how information is stored, exchanged,
and processed between all devices connected over the
Internet. Unlike other approaches that require tens of
megabytes of code, layers upon layers of complexity
that run on only a single platform, and specialized
programming tools, REBOL is small, portable, and easy
to manage.
The difference is clear when you look at the example
given.
The code required to pass a string to another machine
and have it execute is simple enough, but it isn't
enough for the real world.
The code as given presents a massive security risk.
So you have to construct sandboxes and all the rest of
it. Layers upon layers of complexity.
For Rebol the only change you would make to reach
production level code is to create a dialect to
express the necessary functionality.
This does not mean that Rebol is better than these
languages. These other languages have 'eval' as a
nice feature. On the other hand, the ability to send
an expression for another machine to execute is
central to Rebol's purpose.
I think I may be taking this all too seriously.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html
[2] http://www.rebol.com/rebol-intro.html
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