Rebol vs SARS

http://www.compkarori.com/vanilla/display/Lessons+for+Rebol+from+the+SARS+ep idemic

Yes, I suspected that sciam would not put this article on line freely ... http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000312F5-B86B-1E90-8EA5809EC5880000 and that is the case. And what you do read from their summary discloses little.

Is the infectivity rate 1%, .01% or lower :( People often complain on how hard it is to "get" Rebol.

He's one of the co-authors of the above article. I guess Carl was just too busy to follow up.

Me too :) -- Graham Chiu http://www.compkarori.com/vanilla/

Good Article. let me zero in on this line from it: It's also doubtful that making it open source to appeal to the hacker community will have much of a benefit. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Why would that not be a benefit? The programmers that I know can already make (whatever language) flow from their fingertips. No matter how great rebol is, or what benefits it offers, it's been very difficult for me to get them to care. I don't mean to be contrary at all. This is simply what I have observed. Even if opening up rebol is not the end-all solution to widening rebol's appeal, it would probably help. -- signature angry: "grrrrr" -tom

hehe. I put that line in, even though I did not truly believe it, to provoke some more discussion. Naughty of me. Here's Paul Graham's viewpoint on what makes a language popular: http://www.paulgraham.com/paulgraham/popular.html But is open source truly a necessity? Was it necessary for TurboPascal, visual basic? May be that times have changed and now open source is an essential requirement, but my take is that getting major nodes or influential people may be far more important than open sourcing. But if the influential people are also advocates of open source, then we may have a problem. The other problem is how to identify major nodes... -- Graham Chiu http://www.compkarori.com/vanilla/ Rebol Encyclpaedia Project

And of course convincing those nodes of the virtues of REBOL ;-) I think that writing great programs is still the best way to convince people of the value of a development "environment". And writing great programs in REBOL is STILL severely hampered by a few, little (?), often-talked-about-before - but most critical - annoyances: - /View performance for anything else than vaguely form-based applications is not exactly thrilling. Flash is MUCH better for rich media content. - Environment blend-in (Priority 1: Windows, Priority 2: MacOS X, Priority 3: Gnome/KDE/X) is hard to achieve (much harder than with REALbasic for example). That is: - Use of environment facilities (widgets, dialogs, click protocols etc.) - Availability of rich widgets (like an RTF-level text editor, standard in NeXTSTEP since, what, 1987?) - ... - Unicode is a must in today's networked word, like this funky signage or not. - Ease of Shell- and C-level extension (must buy /Pro, where is Core/Pro for Unices? Do I have to buy Command for calling out to grep? SDK? Callbacks?) PLUS there is a severe lack of perceivable strategy. Is IOS developed further? Is anyone still working full-time on REBOL, the language? Etc. As said before, nothing new, but (most unfortunately) still true ... As long as those shortcomings aren't rectified in one form or another, I find it hard to convince _any_ node, be it major or not, of the viability of this great language (and yes, I think that open-sourcing REBOL would help more than not, although it certainly would require a lot of effort to come from the most diverse parties of interest). -- Chris

<snip> rebol deficiencies </snip> If we accept the thesis and conclusion, there are two main possiblities. One I already mentioned. The other is, following the same metaphor, to mutate Rebol into a beast of greater infectivity and virulence whereby even a knowledge of Lisp/Python will not provide immunity :) A more virulent Rebol will include: ( Add your favourite feature request here ...) -- Graham Chiu