[REBOL] Re: Opening a new blog about Rebol?
From: petr:krenzelok:seznam:cz at: 16-Nov-2007 8:35
Hello Alessandro,
I would like to have few comments to your remarks:
Alessandro Manotti napsal(a):
> Yes Henrik, I agree with you.
> Some popular languages have A LOT OF sites dedicated, but everyday many
> others are created.
> I think the only problem regarding Rebol popularity is:
> 1) it is not open source
>
Open source holy grail. Well, that is old topic, and we came thru
various phases. My current conclusion is, that open sourcing whole REBOL
would NOT automatically mean any rise in its popularity. I think that
each new thing has its momentum. And REBOL momentum is gone. It was one
somewhere in 2001 - 2003. Orca, REBOL clone is good example - it is open
sourced, it is Core clone, yet it did not gain any special attraction.
But - some ppl preach to open-source as a holy grail. I have one friend,
who uses REBOL but constantly blames it for not being open sourced. He
uses also Python. So I asked him, if he EVER even looked into Python
sources. The answer was what I expected - even if some problem would
arise, he would NOT be able to fix it himself, having sources or not.
That is some false feeling of "security".
But I understand where it does come from. When RT turned into IOS
(solution) company, we waited for some fixes for years to come, and
noone but RT could fix them. The situation with R3 is going to be
completly different, and that is what we should start to market about
REBOL, as R3 is close, and R2 is nearly a history ....
> 2) Rebol Technologis (the company) does not make enough publicity, and does
> not support the people that try to spread the Rebol-word.
>
Yes, that was true. Sometimes we could not hear or "push" them to do
some action for months. But - RT is open to ideas nowadays. You remember
the material, where they are looking for a marketing guy, full time job?
Remember - that person must know, who "pekr" is :-)
Currently there is a "secret" group on AltME channel, whose purpose is
to redefine websites. We had nearly one week of chats, to define
strategy, where does REBOL want to go, etc. Slow process, but we will
get there. And Carl is there of course, and marketing is one of his main
tasks for overall R3 release. So don't worry, this time, we will try to
make it better than with R2. We also agreed on (amongst many other
things) one point - let's not hype R3 features, unless we can deliver describe product
capabilities "as-is".
OTOH there is a community. This thread is called "Opening a new blog",
and I say - go for it, absolutly! There are already some guys doing good
public work. First guys responsible for rebol.org - it is not easily
visible, but many features there. Then Brian Tiffin encouraging
everybody to rock! :-) And finally Henrik - reading his blog you feel
much better about things coming. Of course I would not like to forget
about collective effort of rebolweek ... So - go for your blog.
> I asked to a friend of mine to try to use (learn) rebol. She told me (she is
> a very good programmer) that she does not want to use rebol because...
>
> 1) on server-side there are MANY programming languages, and they are all
> free (and open source), like PHP, Pyhton, Perl, Java, ASP, c#, visual
> basic#, ruby, etc... So... why paying to use Rebol (since in server side,
> for example, DB is a must, and one cannot use DB (odbc, oracle, etc,...) if
> one does not buy command version.
>
Well, I am not here to argue, but she surely would put JAVA on that list
even one year ago, even when JAVA was not open source. C# is counterpart
for .NET, private technology. Those who seek solutions, would find one -
odbc socket server, which enables core to talk to any ODBC database. But
I get her point, no need to explain it further. I just would wait, and
tried to talk to her later, maybe showing her elegant few liner rebol
code solution, with free R3 database access :-)
> 2) client side: it could be great, but GUI is not yet at highest level (it
> is not the "best of breed").
>
It is not, but it will be. View will rock! I can guarantee you, that
apart from Flash/Flex and maybe Silverlight a bit, NONE of other
languages has anything close to View. Most of them link to external
toolkits - SDL, Qt, Tk, GTK+, etc. The thing is, even REBOL could
integrate to those, the work just was not done. But once again - we will
concentrate upon our advantage - View and its browser plug-in. You
should know, that one of three Ruby's main bounties few years ago was
REBOL/View clone
... guys tried it, but were disappointed because of
its "speed" :-) Besides that, RebGUI is pretty much decent toolkit, much
better than what VID2 provides us with recently.
Besides that - all of those above toolkits push their old sh*tty aproach
on you - objects, objects, etc., down to user level. But - VID user is
not supposed to be a good programmer. So - I hope that with VID3 we
continue being mostly declarative in user level. JAVA guys were also
fed-up with all that stuff, so they brought us JavaFX, and one must
laugh, how it is similar to VID definition - so - so much for cool
overobjected methods of nowadays.
> I think rebol really needs a lot publicity since it is really a great
> language, but I think Rebol Technologies should have to "help" the people
> (aka "promote rebol") to use it, with a license that best fits the current
> market, considerring that their competitors are Python, PHP, M$, Ruby, Java
> & JavaFX, etc...
>
I should now explain strategy a bit. We have two targets here:
- current world, full of other technologies. It will be a tough call, to
get into the group of python, ruby, php, perl league. But there are some
guys interested in further linkage of REBOL to .NET etc technologies. It
will be long way to go, but infrastructure of R3 should allow this
(plug-ins)
- more important target is to concentrate upon what REBOL is good etc -
distributes lightweight computing, using rebol services. Along with
Flash/Flex there might not be other lightweight technology to fill the
market. And once ppl see few nice demos in browser plug-in, see their
nice declarative (readable) source code, those might come. There is
always new generation, which looks for their first language, and we
might attract them. We will probably not easily win you friend
programmer, as you can't teach old do new things easily. Such ppl will
always compare it to aproach they are used to ...
Alessandro - just sit, blog, and watch the show :-)
Cheers,
-pekr-
