Hi all,
Here's something I've been thinking about since talking to a friend
about REBOL and its prospects. He said that just about any scripting
language can handle scripts of a few hundred lines, but the real
challenge for REBOL will be in whether or not it can handle large-scale
programs as well as, for example, Python. Take Zope (www.zope.org), for
instance, a Web application server written in Python (with a few native
modules). I just downloaded the latest version and ran a quick line
count on all the .py files: 83165 lines, plus another 10391 lines for
the ZServer HTTP server! That includes comments, but still I'm very
impressed that the language can scale up to handle a project of this
size.
One project I'd like to work on once I'm finished with my current
programming contract job would be to look through the source code to
Zope and figure out how feasible it would be to do something of that
size with REBOL. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that one big
limitation of REBOL currently is the lack of solid module support.
DO'ing subsidiary scripts doesn't seem like the right approach,
especially compared to Python's powerful import facility. I know there
are some third-party module managers available (which to be honest, I
haven't had time to investigate), but this seems like the type of thing
that needs to be built into the language. I would assume that RT is
aware of this, and hopefully working on a solution, but are there any
other areas where REBOL is currently lacking? I don't want REBOL to be
only useful for quick hacks!!
-Jake
