Computer Science Canada

REBOL ... poke prod ... go look.

Author:  btiffin [ Tue Jun 24, 2008 12:38 am ]
Post subject:  REBOL ... poke prod ... go look.

I'm still trying to persuade the esteemed compsci.ca readers to check out REBOL.

Here are a couple of articles I've written for the rebol.org library.

REBOL Levels is a lighthearted discussion on the steps to learning REBOL.
rebol.org talks about the library itself.
user.r discusses user.r. This is an introductory and historical article written before the International REBOL User Association had picked a name. user.r

As always http://www.rebol.com

Cheers

Author:  wtd [ Tue Jun 24, 2008 12:44 am ]
Post subject:  RE:REBOL ... poke prod ... go look.

I have checked it out. I find it frustrating to try to read code written in REBOL.

The world has about a billion different programming languages. If one isn't fun, then barring some other pressing motivation*, I don't bother with it.

* Java isn't fun, but it's also not going anywhere anytime soon, especially in education, so I wrote the Intro to help students.

Author:  btiffin [ Tue Jun 24, 2008 2:18 am ]
Post subject:  Re: REBOL ... poke prod ... go look.

wtd; You know that I'm making one of my life goals to somehow describe REBOL from an angle that may give you that motivation. Wink

Mine was the expressive power, the out of the box functionality and I'll admit, the challenge of discovering the nooks and crannies of the REBOL way of development. I was already a paid rebol professional before I started "getting" some of the concepts that set REBOL apart. Love it; the deeper you go, the deeper it gets. I think I have some 2'000 hours of development time behind me and there is new potential and sub-features to be discovered all the time. Amazingly, REBOL/Core is 200K of executable. Still freaks me out. Imagine a guy from a 1970's hippie flick; high pitched excited voice, "It still freaks me out man!"

I think that is what attracts me so much. I don't spend endless hours looking through libraries to find the magic piece to the current puzzle I face. The pieces I need are right there in the REBOL console waiting to bust out. Ok, I lied about the endless hours of looking through software libraries ... but that is me being me and scanning each and every language I can get my grubby little hands on. Not to solve any particular work problem, but to scratch the hobby itch.

If you ever do give REBOL a good tire kicking, and I hope you do, do so from the REBOL console. The reflective HELP and SOURCE functions and the Viewtop Word Browser can and should clear up any frustrating first grok semantics. Browse to http://rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore.html while running the REBOL >> prompt and start to play.

This isn't over ... Twisted Evil

Author:  wtd [ Wed Jun 25, 2008 12:18 am ]
Post subject:  RE:REBOL ... poke prod ... go look.

The problem is having to argument count. It's simply an insurmountable issue for me. I don't want to have to know how every function/routine/whatever used works in order to infer how it works from reading it.

There are some interesting ideas in REBOL, but I just can't get past the ambiguity in the syntax.

Imagine a curve that asymptotically approaches infinite syntactic ambiguity (note, not "complexity"). Things like Lisp, IO, Smalltalk... they're down near zero ambiguity. REBOL... that's as close as you can get to the asymptote.

Author:  michaelp [ Tue Jul 01, 2008 6:51 pm ]
Post subject:  RE:REBOL ... poke prod ... go look.

Are you ever gonna stop this REBOL madness?!?!? You and these weird languages... except for maybe when you posted D a while ago. That looks like it's gonna be good when people start to use it. Smile

Author:  btiffin [ Tue Jul 01, 2008 10:12 pm ]
Post subject:  RE:REBOL ... poke prod ... go look.

Umm, no. Smile Wait till REBOL/3 goes to Beta. I'll be here with highlights every 12 seconds.

Carl, the designer, is right in the thick of the California wildfires, so the alpha has been put off track a little bit. More soon.

Really. REBOL is thee network environment for those that care to deal with its differences. And I'll convince wtd someday. I've made it a goal. Some feature, or some angle that will make it worth his while. And I'll put up odds that once he works with it for a short time the fun factor will kick in, big time. What is seen as ambiguity at first glance will transform to unsurpassed expressive power. Really. I think. Wink

Don't get me wrong. I greatly respect wtd's opinions and I learn a lot from his posts and hope to learn more.

Cheers


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