[REBOL] What language am I looking for?
From: geoff:productivity at: 16-May-2001 13:08
Hi folks
I have been following this thread with great interest.
We are playing with an idea for a code generator that will produce highly
confurable web applications without the usual birds-nest of conditional
code. This will obviously be easier with a highly dynamic and introspective
language, which is why we are looking at Rebol.
But this thread has alerted me to the possibilities of Lisp - especially the
reference to Paul Graham's article "Beating the Averages" about building the
Yahoo webstore interface.
I had always seen Lisp as a backwater for AI specialists, but it is clear
that there is a healthy little community who are using it for general
programming, and claiming very substantial payoffs in terms of pruductivity,
power and elegance. As one of the oldest languages, it obviously has the
edge over Rebol in terms of maturity. And as there are compilers that output
ASCII C is is pretty portable.
I would be interested in the comments of anyone who has hands-on experience
of working in Rebol and Lisp. They would certainly seem to have much in
common. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches - why
did Carl feel the need for a new language rather than using Lisp?
Geoff Caplan
