[REBOL] Community (was IOS).
From: tbrownell::shaw::ca at: 18-Mar-2002 11:47
Here's a quote from the second article from Jason's IOS post...
According to Sassenrath, another complaint he hears often is that REBOL
isn't open source. The scripts are open source, but the system itself is
not. Sassenrath says that the company plans to release the system one day,
but that it needs to age a bit more.
While we control it, we can give 100
percent confidence that a script you write on one machine will run on any
other machine. Once we open it, that will start to fade." Strangely enough,
this hasn't proven to be a problem for the many other languages that have
been released openly. "
I started using Rebol because it was just so darn easy to learn, and makes
great AI.
But I find myself referencing other languages more and more when trying to
determine how to do something in .R. eg: Need to control some app via API?
Let's see how they do it in Perl etc. Of late, I've being reading up on PHP
again. Not bad, gots a compiler and everything. It's great if you need
dynamic pages with MySQL access, of course, it can't do everything that .R
can.
But PHP and the other languages out there have something that Rebol
doesn't... community, and plenty of it. As an experiment I did various
google searches using "n tutorial" (with quotes), with the following page
counts ...
Java tutorial
- 81,600
PHP tutorial
- 9,940
C++ tutorial
- 9,820
Perl tutorial
- 13,600
Rebol tutorial
- 42
42? Yes, 42. The problem is the Rebol community, although incredibly savvy
and helpful, is just too small. No wonder there's a lack of documentation,
simply no one around to create it. I belive this has been recognized by RT,
so they've been concentrating on IOS rather than expending on Rebol itself
for so few users. (Relatively speaking). Any one "killer app" idea is worth
more than the language it is written in.
So, if RT is going to just concentrate on apps, then why not offer Pro and
command for free? Of course, if View/Pro/Command is making ANY decent money
at all, then forget it, but if not, why not. I don't see Rebol growing too
quickly given all the options out there that have 2000 times the community,
and are free as well.
Of course, if it was opened, then the community would grow as well.
TB
