Re: [ba-ohs-talk] TouchGraph used on Langreiter.com
At 11:37 PM 12/10/2001 -0800, you wrote:
>Good article on Rebol at
>http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-10/lw-10-rebol.html
>
>Rebol is free and available for nearly every platform, including old and
>new Macs. If you want to do something commercial with it, it's only $79
>for a commercial license.
>
>I would think that a lively discussion about Rebol is in order here.
>
>Jack (01)
To see what the slashdot folks thought about an interview regarding Rebol,
look at:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23113&cid=0&pid=0&startat=&threshold=1&m
ode=thread&commentsort=3&op=Change (02)
That's a rather long address. Make sure you get it all. Actually, it's the
actual page of the replies, but changed to show highest ranked replies
first. Main issues touted were:
not open source
not a "common" language
can't win over .net or .java because they can't afford such a battle
uses too much memory (03)
At another page:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=larry+wall+rebol&hl=en&safe=off&rnum=1&ic=
1&selm=36406F9F.40E9CB59%40ndirect.co.uk_NOSPAM (04)
Larry Wall had this to say: (05)
"So far I think REBOL falls into the category of a cute toy. The
documentation is sketchy and contains a certain amount of functional mumbo
jumbo. The licensing terms for the REBOL interpreter are unclear from
either the documentation or the web site. It's "free", but I don't know
whether the source is available. The language makes some things easy, but
other things very difficult. There's no support for system-dependent
programming. Associative arrays are emulated, but don't scale well (200
times slower than Perl for 1000 elements). There are no regular expressions
for pattern matching. Where Perl and REBOL have corresponding builtin
functionality, the REBOL interpreter seems to run about ten times slower
than the Perl interpreter. " (06)
It's hard to know which version of Rebol he was playing with. (07)
My thoughts: a quick surf on Rebol was fun. It's easy to like a tiny
language engine that's ported to practically every platform in use (can't
say that for Java, etc). It's somewhat easy to like a language engine that
wants to take on the Goliaths (I tend to root for underdogs). It's not too
easy to get excited about a language engine that's not in some way open
source (there is reportedly Oscar and Primo as open source variants of
Rebol, but nothing is actually available). (08)
Enough surfing for me.
Cheers
Jack (09)