[REBOL] Re: What language am I looking for?
From: geoff:productivity at: 18-May-2001 10:14
Joel
> I've written a site generator which uses XML
> to express the structure, navigation, and search information for
> a site, then constructs the entire site (including per-page
> navigation links) using html templates.
Our idea arose out of our need for a sophisticated online catalogue.
Contractor quotes ranged from $30,000 to $60,000, which is a lot of $$ for a
small business. Yet once you have your underlying error/session/validation
etc libraries in place, the task of generating any specific catalogue is
essentially trivial. These guys were going to charge us $x00 per hour for
hand-hacking simple code that we suspect could be generated automatically
with a few switches, given a little craft and guile, (provided we can
develop a data model with sufficient flexibility). After all, the final
output of any dynamic web app is just a string - hardly rocket science.
.
> I have, in fact, often described REBOL as being like "LISP without the
parentheses".
> I'd suggest that REBOL has a few advantages on its side of the ledger:
>
> 1) Platform independence <snip...>
> 2) Built-in networking - How could it be any easier? <snip...>
> 3) Compactness <snip...>
This is interesting. It helps clarify why Carl places so much emphasis on
Rebol as a tool for distributed apps. These advantages carry most weight
when a client built in Rebol will be widely distibuted. The size, in
particular, is a spectacular achievement. But compared with Lisp, these
advantages seem less compelling where the whole app is on a central server,
as with a web app.
Would you agree, or am I missing something here...
Thanks for the input
Geoff Caplan
