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]

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]

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, (e-mail address removed) (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.

 

[Eric J. Roode]

(e-mail address removed) (Mike Henley) wrote in @posting.google.com:

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. ....
What's wrong with Rebol?

I dunno -- who said anything was wrong with it?

(Note: I don't know rebol, so I may not be the person to ask here.)