Carl Sassenrath Talks About REBOL

Rebelos writes: "REBOL is a powerful software technology (ever thought that you could write a full blown GUI Instant Messenger in only 7 KB of source code?) optimized specifically for Internet usage. Rebol Tech, the company behind REBOL, consists of only 10 people and they claim they can compete and go against .NET and Microsoft's dubious plans. Their platform has been ported to 44 operating systems so far! Take a look as to what Carl Sassenrath, ex-AmigaOS/Commodore engineer and founder of Rebol, says at OSNews about the Rebol platform, its deployment, other programming languagees, Microsoft etc." The buzzwords are pretty thick in here, and the ideas are interesting, if a little vague. If the interview makes you curious, check out the previous stories touching on Rebol as well.

big deal

[mj6798]

High level scripting languages are a dime a dozen. Systems like expectk and wxPython give you similar ease of programming. If you like something more Lisp-ish, there are various Scheme systems with built-in GUIs. The main thing that distinguishes Rebol is that you can't get an open source implementation of it and that it has a much smaller user community.

As for "going against .NET", big efforts like that are not about technology, they are about marketing and people. And they are also about the long-term availability and tools support that a large company like Microsoft (or Sun, in the case of Java) brings to the table.

But even technologically, it is an error to confuse a scripting language with a system like .NET or Java. Yes, Rebol, Python, and Perl are much simpler to program than .NET or Java. Yes, they run a few important things somewhat faster. But .NET and Java are natively compiled, fast, general-purpose programming environments with static type checking and large libraries (written in Java itself in the case of Java), and that just makes them much more useful for large-real world problems. You see, another misconception is that the easier you make programming in a language, the more useful it is in real-world applications.

Language Lockin problem

[Waffle Iron]

There have been quite a few self-contained systems architecture solutions put out over the years (Java and Smalltalk come to mind), and this looks like another one. All of them meet a lot of resistance because they make you use a language that is not the favorite language of the 90% of developers out there who have a different favorite language.

No matter what you think about Microsoft and its practices, the .NET strategy is more likely to attract a wide variety of developers because it allows them to use most any language they want. (.NET has an OS lockin problem, but the 90%/10% ratio is in MS's favor in that case).

REBOL may be extremely cool; I'm going to have to take a look at the language spec. However, I don't think that any single language will ever take over the whole world.

rebol kicks bootie

[LazyDawg]

If it weren't for rebol I wouldn't have a 25 line script to grab the stock market closes every day from yahoo.com. If you want to get batches of web pages and parse them for useful information, use rebol. It rocks.

If it were more widely accepted, rebol would make a really sweet web language, too, allowing more control over the interface, with less garbage in the page's source code.

If you thought C++ was a bad idea...

[SumDeusExMachina]

...then REBOL is likely to give you nightmares! Good God, people, I have not seen any other language as bloated as this one! Not even Java can come close in the terms of the sheer amount of crap already included in this language!

I mean, what happens if you don't happen to like the way that this thing handles TCP connections on your particular platform? You are basically screwed, as not only are underlying routines written in another language, but you don't even get to see the source! I'm shocked that Slashdot would even post such a thing here, considering that the closest analog that I can find to this is VB, and, honestly folks, we do not need more idiots of the using class writing their own AOL Instant Messanger or other crap like that that will probably kill the network I admin.

Use OpenRebol instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah - it does not exist. Rebol is proprietary, so why would anyone want to use it?

More detail...

[alienmole]

Close, but no cigar. The first Lisp interpreter was written in Lisp. Before that, humans used to take Lisp code and convert it into machine code. Then McCarthy put out an exercise for his students to write a Lisp interpreter in Lisp itself. Then, one of the "human compilers" compiled this piece of Lisp code, and voila! You now had the ability to compile Lisp code.

The Lisp-like language I was referring to is the one listed on this page [uni-erlangen.de] - look for the heading "The First Known Interpreter". This language is not Lisp as we know it - it used McCarthy's M-expression syntax - and syntactically, it is not the S-expression language that the first interpreter was capable of interpreting. Hence my statement that "the very first computer language interpreter ever was a Lisp interpreter, written in a Lisp-like language".

In "The implementation of Lisp [stanford.edu]" by McCarthy himself, he describes the following:

I decided to write a paper describing LISP both as a programming language and as a formalism for doing recursive function theory. The paper was "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, part I".
...
Another way to show that LISP was neater than Turing machines was to write a universal LISP function and show that it is briefer and more comprehensible than the description of a universal Turing machine. This was the LISP function eval[e,a], ...
...
S.R. Russell noticed that eval could serve as an interpreter for LISP, promptly hand coded it, and we now had a programming language with an interpreter.

This was why I said McCarthy wrote the interpreter as something of a mathematical exercise. He was writing his "universal Lisp function" to illustrate a point in a paper, and didn't even consider that he was writing an interpreter - apparently Steve Russell noticed that. So that's why I said it was written as "something of a mathematical exercise".

Do I get that cigar now?

Why this stuff sucks

[MSBob]

I'm running eight different rebol apps on my system all at the same time. Each weighs in at between 6 and 12 MBytes. That's waay too much for such primitive apps (like that calculator using up 6,804K ). With such memory consumption this thing just eats memory like peanuts more so than Java. That's why I find Java unacceptable and that's why I think this stuff is crap too.

All this angst!

[Junks Jerzey]

Bashing languages with the usual "But you can also do that in language X!" comments and general defensive put-downs is misguided. Of course you can do the same thing in any language; that's a fundamental principle of computer science. The reason we have a variety of languages is because some languages make things easier than others.

In Perl, munging through text files is a snap. The syntax is succint, and regular expressions are supported at the language level. But that doesn't mean Perl is good for everything, though. Regular expressions don't scale up to what you'd need to write a full BNF parser in Perl. And, sure, you can hook to http and ftp libraries, but they aren't integrated into the language in the same way that the "file exists?" operator is.

REBOL has several strengths. One is that its parsing features effectively *are* BNF, so you can write complex parsers for mini-languages with great ease, and without resorting to lex, yacc, and such. The other advantage is that having language-level support for internet protocols is very convenient. Sure, you can get at them through a Perl module, but if you argue that then you have to ask why regular expressions shouldn't be a separate module as well.

All this blind bashing of languages is tiring. It's exactly like the kiddies who bash whatever game console they didn't get for Christmas.