what's wrong with REBOL?

[Mike Henley]

I first came across rebol a while ago; it seemed interesting but then
i was put off by its proprietary nature, although the core of the
language is a free download.

Recently however, i can't help but say i was totally impressed. I
needed an open source wikiblog/wikilog, whatever you wanna call it,
basically a hybrid of a blog and a wiki. I checked out snipsnap, which
uses java, it was said on their site to be a clone of vanilla, a
wikilog written with rebol. I wanted an open source thing so i could
modify it to my needs.

snipsnap turned out to be, even apparent on the first day of use, way
too far from being mature and reliable, and although they said it
doesn't require a server, it required a download of the sun java sdk,
which, when installed, was well over 400Mbs of space on my hard drive.
Not to mention another over 100Mbs for the JVM.

So as i needed a mature enough solution, but liked the way snipsnap
worked, i looked around, and on freshmeat i found vanilla, with a
development status of 5; production/stable. I went to its site, where
a working demo impressed with its capabilities. The site is though
poorly documented, very poorly documented i had to use trial and error
to work out how to install it. Anyhow, what impressed me was that the
download, which was less than half a megabyte, installed vanilla,
which is the wikilog, an apache server, and the rebol interpreter,
which is the free download version. And it self-installed! It turned
out to be a very very capable wikilog, and highly extensible. I am
still amazed and impressed by it after a couple of days of use.

Rebol itself seemed a very easy to read language. Sorta like ho
readable SQL is. I might even say more readable than python or ruby,
or at least as readable.

I have the intention to learn it over the coming few days, at least to
customize vanilla to my needs.

So i ask you guys, what's wrong with Rebol? i mean other than it's
proprietary nature. 'cos anyway, there are many commercial IDEs for
open source languages, and if smitten enough i might even consider a
rebol SDK. It just amazes me for how readable it is, how much it seems
to enable to do with so little code, and the size and capability of
the final solution.

What's wrong with Rebol?

[John Roth]

"Mike Henley" <mn******@msn.com> wrote in message
news:60**************************@posting.google.c om...

I first came across rebol a while ago; it seemed interesting but then
i was put off by its proprietary nature, although the core of the
language is a free download.

Recently however, i can't help but say i was totally impressed. I
needed an open source wikiblog/wikilog, whatever you wanna call it,
basically a hybrid of a blog and a wiki. I checked out snipsnap, which
uses java, it was said on their site to be a clone of vanilla, a
wikilog written with rebol. I wanted an open source thing so i could
modify it to my needs.

snipsnap turned out to be, even apparent on the first day of use, way
too far from being mature and reliable, and although they said it
doesn't require a server, it required a download of the sun java sdk,
which, when installed, was well over 400Mbs of space on my hard drive.
Not to mention another over 100Mbs for the JVM.

So as i needed a mature enough solution, but liked the way snipsnap
worked, i looked around, and on freshmeat i found vanilla, with a
development status of 5; production/stable. I went to its site, where
a working demo impressed with its capabilities. The site is though
poorly documented, very poorly documented i had to use trial and error
to work out how to install it. Anyhow, what impressed me was that the
download, which was less than half a megabyte, installed vanilla,
which is the wikilog, an apache server, and the rebol interpreter,
which is the free download version. And it self-installed! It turned
out to be a very very capable wikilog, and highly extensible. I am
still amazed and impressed by it after a couple of days of use.

Rebol itself seemed a very easy to read language. Sorta like ho
readable SQL is. I might even say more readable than python or ruby,
or at least as readable.

I have the intention to learn it over the coming few days, at least to
customize vanilla to my needs.

So i ask you guys, what's wrong with Rebol? i mean other than it's
proprietary nature. 'cos anyway, there are many commercial IDEs for
open source languages, and if smitten enough i might even consider a
rebol SDK. It just amazes me for how readable it is, how much it seems
to enable to do with so little code, and the size and capability of
the final solution.

What's wrong with Rebol?

I don't know that there's anything "wrong" with it, other than
it's a special purpose language designed to fit in one niche,
and do its job well (at least in the eyes of its designers.)
I'm not about to download a humongous reference manual
to compare it with Python. If it serves your needs, go for it.

John Roth

[Terry Reedy]

"Mike Henley" <mn******@msn.com> wrote in message
news:60**************************@posting.google.c om...

So as i needed a mature enough solution, but liked the way snipsnap
worked, i looked around, and on freshmeat i found vanilla, with a
development status of 5; production/stable. I went to its site, where a working demo impressed with its capabilities. The site is though
poorly documented, very poorly documented i had to use trial and error to work out how to install it.
If you learned something that might help others, consider contributing
a writeup if you think (or find out) that site maintainers would
consider adding it.
What's wrong with Rebol?

It is not Python ;-) and I don't know what unmet need it would fill
for me. But your experience moved it up a bit on the list of
languages I might look at someday.

Terry J. Reedy

[Christopher Browne]

After takin a swig o' Arrakan spice grog, mn******@msn.com (Mike Henley) belched out...:

I first came across rebol a while ago; it seemed interesting but then
i was put off by its proprietary nature, although the core of the
language is a free download. ... much omitted ... What's wrong with Rebol?

"What's wrong" is that 'proprietary nature.' If I write code in Perl,
Python, or Ruby, I can be certain that I won't get bitten because of
someone pulling the rug out from under them.

I can't be certain in the same way of the perpetual availability of
REBOL.

Furthermore, if I am considering whether to build and contribute a
module to REBOL (where the user base is necessarily limited) or to
Perl/Python/Ruby, I'd be more inclined to do the latter. And so there
are LOTS of third party libraries for these other languages.
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string "moc.enworbbc" "@" "enworbbc"))
http://cbbrowne.com/info/linuxdistributions.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #102. "I will not waste time making my
enemy's death look like an accident -- I'm not accountable to anyone
and my other enemies wouldn't believe it.

[Jeff Epler]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 09:03:17PM +0000, Christopher Browne wrote:

"What's wrong" is that 'proprietary nature.' If I write code in Perl,
Python, or Ruby, I can be certain that I won't get bitten because of
someone pulling the rug out from under them.

I can't be certain in the same way of the perpetual availability of
REBOL.

Of course, it's also possible that it might become impossible to use
"non-proprietary" software.

There are legal reasons: Perhaps the software will be found to violate
a patent, or infringe copyright. Perhaps it will be judged to violate a
DMCA-type law. Perhaps a new "software defects" law will be impossible
for free software to conform to (for instance, due to a requirement that
the software developer post a bond against damages caused by defects in
the software).

There are also technical reasons: How many programmer-hours do you think
it would take to port X10 (the predecessor to X11) to MacOS X running
on Itanium? Or to XBox2? What if the dominant machine/OS combination in
the future makes it hard or impossible to run programs written in your
chosen language (JVM doesn't support C efficiently, for instance), or
uses DRM to keep you from running arbitrary unsigned code (under a system
of this type, interpreters like Python would obvously never be Signed)

Jeff

[Tim Lesher]

Jeff Epler <je****@unpythonic.net> wrote in message news:<ma**********************************@python. org>...

On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 09:03:17PM +0000, Christopher Browne wrote:

"What's wrong" is that 'proprietary nature.' If I write code in Perl,
Python, or Ruby, I can be certain that I won't get bitten because of
someone pulling the rug out from under them.

I can't be certain in the same way of the perpetual availability of
REBOL.

Of course, it's also possible that it might become impossible to use
"non-proprietary" software.

Yes, but any of the apocalyptic situations you mention could happen
equally well with proprietary software, and comparing the complexity
of portion X10 to that of porting Python (or a similarly-sized,
well-factored language) is ridiculous.

The gamut of things that would make you completely lose your
investment in the language is non-zero with open source languages like
Perl or Python, but it's definitely smaller than with proprietary ones
like REBOL.

On that note, I tried REBOL a few years ago, just before trying
Python. I found it an amazing language, but I settled on Python for
exactly this reason. Since then, I've found the Python community to
have grown significantly, while the REBOL community has not. I don't
think that's a coincidence.

--
Tim Lesher
ti*@lesher.ws

[Cameron Laird]

In article <ma**********************************@python.org >,
Jeff Epler <je****@unpythonic.net> wrote:

For a language to be "right" for me, it must satisfy a lot of qualities.

One of them is some notion of freedom. For instance, will I be left
high and dry if I want to use this language on some new device or
system architecture? (For instance, when I start buying Itanium or
Opteron servers to replace my racks of decrepit Xeons..)

Here are two ways I can be pretty sure this won't happen:
* Can I have the source code? (C, C++, Python, Perl) I'll port it to
my new platform.
* Is there already a standard with multiple working implementations?
(C, C++, C#, Python) This multiplies the chances that some
implementation will be ported to my new platform.

As far as I can tell, the Rebol folks don't include source code with any
of their licensing options (SDK, etc), and it doesn't look like their
documentation gives enough information for a third-party to write their
own implementation either.

Of course, for those who already rely on single-source software with no
source-code availability (*cough*microsoft*cough*), maybe this isn't
such a big deal. But having been prevented from upgrading to a modern
version of a compiler by a no-source third-party C++ library recently,
I don't relish the idea of being reduced to begging for a recompiled
version of commercial software again.

Jeff

Source code is available for some parts of REBOL, under
some circumstances. Discussion of REBOL's proprietary,
closed-source nature has dominated this thread, though,
and that's appropriate.

REBOL has a few technical failings, as well. While I think
it's quite rare for anyone to decide against REBOL because
of these, there's real value in being specific, rather than
treating the language as a rather cloudy abstraction.

Unfortunately, I'm not a good candidate for the task. It's
been a couple years since I was current with REBOL. Among
the blemishes I believe the language (including its
libraries) still exhibits are:
* an inflexible concurrency model
* cumbersome interfaces to modules
coded in other languages (conse-
quence: embedding and extending
are impractical)
* arguable scalability, in the sense
of what appears to be skimpy sup-
port for team-written projects
* no /APACHE for convenient scripting
with the market-leading Web server
* near GUIlessness
* inconsistent functional-vs-object-
oriented semantics in aspects of
program evaluation

Conclusion: there's a lot to like about REBOL; it's not
perfect; its licensing, rather than technical factors,
dominates most use decisions.
--

Cameron Laird <Ca*****@Lairds.com>
Business: http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal: http://phaseit.net/claird/home.html

[Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters]

Jeff Epler <je****@unpythonic.net> wrote previously:
|There are legal reasons: Perhaps the software will be found to violate
|a patent, or infringe copyright. Perhaps it will be judged to violate a
|DMCA-type law. Perhaps a new "software defects" law will be impossible
|for free software to conform to (for instance, due to a requirement that
|the software developer post a bond against damages caused by defects in
|the software).

Yeah... and perhaps the word 'disingenuous' will be removed from future
editions of popular dictionaries; and then we will lack a concise way to
describe "special pleading" of this sort. I think it's unlikely though.

Yours, Lulu...

--
mertz@ _/_/_/_/_/_/_/ THIS MESSAGE WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:_/_/_/_/ v i
gnosis _/_/ Postmodern Enterprises _/_/ s r
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[Jeff Epler]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 12:32:19AM -0400, Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters wrote:

Yeah... and perhaps the word 'disingenuous' will be removed from future
editions of popular dictionaries; and then we will lack a concise way to
describe "special pleading" of this sort. I think it's unlikely though.

Hey, big fella. I'm on your side. I was just playing devil's advocate
for a moment.

Jeff

[Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters]

Jeff Epler <je****@unpythonic.net> wrote previously:
|There are legal reasons: Perhaps the software will be found to violate
|a patent, or infringe copyright. Perhaps it will be judged to violate a
|DMCA-type law. Perhaps a new "software defects" law will be impossible
|for free software to conform to (for instance, due to a requirement that
|the software developer post a bond against damages caused by defects in
|the software).

Yeah... and perhaps the word 'disingenuous' will be removed from future
editions of popular dictionaries; and then we will lack a concise way to
describe "special pleading" of this sort. I think it's unlikely though.

Yours, Lulu...

--
mertz@ _/_/_/_/_/_/_/ THIS MESSAGE WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:_/_/_/_/ v i
gnosis _/_/ Postmodern Enterprises _/_/ s r
..cx _/_/ MAKERS OF CHAOS.... _/_/ i u
_/_/_/_/_/ LOOK FOR IT IN A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU_/_/_/_/_/ g s