[REBOL] Re: What's Up Rebol?
From: chris:starforge:demon at: 6-Mar-2002 15:03
Jim Richards wrote:
Yow, no wordwrap... ;)
> keep coming back to Rebol. Why? Because it is a brilliant work
> of art. There is nothing out there that can compare to Rebols'
> simplicity and uniqueness. So, I am forced to ask myself a lot
> of questions.
Here's my take on some of them - note these probably are very
contentious ;)
> Why aren't more programmers adopting the language?
> Oh, and then there's "Rebol /Core [User Guide] You know the one
< without the index. The "Index" you know that indispensable thing
> as technicians that we refer to on a daily basis.
These two are, to an extent, interwined.
One of th emajor factors involved is that it isn't free. Perl may
be widely regarded as a Read Only Language, python may be a bit
idiosyncratic, Ruby may be a bit rough around the edges. However, all
three are free - you don't need a license to commercially deploy a
python script, you don't have to buy a pro version of perl to run
sendmail (with more on top if your script is going to be used
commercially). Yes, people will use a tool that gets the job done
faster even when they have to pay for it, which brings us to the
second big problem: the complete dearth of decent REBOL
documentation. No matter how good a lanugage is, it is useless without
good documentation. Right now on the shelf next to me I have 8 perl
books, and that is just a tiny fraction of the number of books there
are out there. I have language specs, I have complete, indexed,
searchable API documentation. For REBOL? I have a user guide that is
out of date with poor indexing and the Official guide which, while
fine for what it covers, isn't a great deal of help in many, many areas.
If you're a script hack under pressure to get a job done and you
have a choice between REBOL and it's non-existent docs, forced to rely
on this list if you hit something you can't trial and error, or Perl
with it's 17-rainforests worth of books, online tutorials, CPAN and
the rest or python (which is getting the same way) or <insert any
other free scripting lanugages out there> which would you choose,
really?
It'd be nice if it was REBOL, but too often it is more work to make a
good REBOL solution than an adequate Perl one. To say nothing of what
happens when you want a commercial script with Oracle database access,
my boss couldn't stop laughing when I showed her the price for
/command
Until RT do something that justifies techs working to a buget blowing
a fair chunk of it on a lanauge that doesn't do anything substantially
different from the free tools already available the uptake is going to
remain low., especially when getting the most out of the language is
virtually impossible due to the lack of information..
Chris
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