I loved reading the two post from Jake and Garold. They express things I've
been musing over for years.
My own, coupla bits:
With any description there is an irreducible amount of information that has
to be encoded. Whether this has been done as an interface or as a monolithic
program or system. The great thing that Rebol has done is to give the
"Reboler" (programmer/user) power in expressing and interpreting this
minimum of information. Maybe we call this stuff a dialect - a better
language to communicate in. This then is how I understand RT description of
Rebol being a messaging language - an' boy don' it do that well.
So from this great ideas flow. One day I had an idea - may not be original
but hey my brain produced it - one day I'll try it too. I thought well Rebol
is so cool at languages I can buy me a voice interpreter and use it to chuck
some dialectical words at Rebol and think of the possibilites. Now how does
it work on Voyager? "Computer.." "Bip beep"....
Another. I've found that I'm wanting to write input-parsers for Rebol that
take information out of existing format and place it in Rebol blocks where I
suspect I'll be able describe all sort of wonderful transformations before
forming into other formats again. One example. I got my
tab-delimited-with-quoted-strings parser thingy happening. Now if get my
Flash SWF input/output thingy happening I'll be able to combine the result
and produce a Flash spreadsheet! Cool eh? Well, ok not cool. Probably dum.
BUT I would have NEVER DREAMED of doing that before. Thats the point I
think.
Components. In my Rebolised mind now, a component is an interpreter with
associated context. Thus, this component can be in my Rebol script, sitting
in Java, sitting in Javascript in a browser, sitting on in another process
on my machine, on another machine behind a port or maybe one day be part of
a Rebol-OS accessible from the OS prompt. This isn't new this is what is
today. Rebol has accepted it and provided another way to talk between them.
I think components arrived when system theory game them birth - just maybe
no-one celebrated at the time because they could'nt work out they were.
They're here to stay because we have a wired and distributed world to talk
to, but maybe not existing in the form the designers of COM and CORBA
thought they might.
End-of-trip. Boy that coffee was strong.
Brett.
