REALLY DISCOVER THE POWER OF REBOL
I have been learning, using & experimenting with REBOL for about
18 months now and I'm sure like many others on this List am very
excited about REBOL, it's power & it's prospects.
As I once read somewhere, REBOL is the cocaine of scripting languages,
it is highly addictive & you just have to get more!.
Various interesting issues frequently crop up on this list, for example,
aspects of a particular REBOL behaviour or feature, suspected bugs /
problems,
future developments, wish lists, feature requests etc.
Another great feature of the REBOL community is sharing of knowledge,
experience, help, advice & generally friendly nature of comments
& debates. All those who regularly feature on the list participate
willingly & constructively, which is also great.
Carl & all the rest of the REBOL Crew are also doing great work,
producing quality products as well as finding time to contribute
to the various lists, to explain, to announce, to clarify & even
to disagree as appropriate.
What is not so great is the frustrations which surface on the list
from time to time. Feature's not yet implemented, Which Products
should be given priority /Core /View /Command /Express etc,
Documentation or the sufficient lack of, Late Release dates,
Persisting bugs, Platforms supported, Rebols future direction or needs.
First of all as I previously stated Carl & Rebol Co. are doing a great
job developing the language, products, documentation, communicating to
lists, organising & running Rebol Technologies to provide us with
REBOL as we've come to know and love.
Are we happy with their contribution - YES Indeed!, can we expect them
to do more - NO!, they're doing their very best to juggle the conflicting
demands & successfully keep all the balls in the air & keep everyone happy.
Should we be content & just accept the situation as things are,
afterall the REBOL people are doing their best, REBOL's available for
free, should we be happy with what we've got, we can't reasonably
demand anymore.
Not necessarily so, WE CAN HELP OURSELVES!
If we really want to understand the internals of REBOL, if we really
want the language to develop as we would wish & not at the behest of
a Corporate Management or Marketing Department, WE CAN HELP OURSELVES!
WE CAN HELP OURSELVES!
This is my main point of what is becoming a very long post indeed.
The finite resources & corporate demands on REBOL TECHNOLOGIES inc.
are the biggest bottleneck to the future direction & speed of development
of REBOL, as a language & technology.
Third Party Developers is where the real growth of REBOL or any software
technology comes from, and right now the biggest Third Party is US,
Rebol.org, the users list!
Now to the meat of my suggested solutions, two projects, organised
& run by us, the people on the REBOL lists, developed & discussed
either here or at some other friendly host like www.egroups.com .
Project 1 - OSCAR
OSCAR Open Source Code Aka Rebol
OSCAR Open Source Code Attempted Rebol
OSCAR Open Source Code Acts-like Rebol
OSCAR Open Source Code Adheres-to Rebol
OSCAR Open Source Code Assimilates Rebol
Pet-Name ( Alternative ? )
CARLS CARL Sassenrath's Advanced Rebol Language System
>From the OSCAR name above, you might have guessed the proposal
is for those of us language buffs sufficiently intrigued by the
internal workings of REBOL is to develop our own REBOL Interpreter.
WHY ?
1. To further our understanding of REBOL's inner workings.
2. To experiment ourselves with various implementation features.
3. To provide a REBOL for use on DEBIAN & free software systems.
4. To ensure the protection of REBOL language from corporate control
or abuse or neglect, i.e. The AMIGA fiasco's / sad stories.
5. For the fun of it!.
Carl stated in the past on of the reasons REBOL would not be opened
sourced until much later would be to prevent fragmentation.
This would be the prime directive of OSCAR if it goes ahead,
All official user releases must look like REBOL, smell like REBOL &
for all intents & purposes mimic REBOL behaviour as best as possible.
This need not deter experimentation, if fact useful new development
features could be sent to REBOL.com for consideration & possible
inclusion in official REBOL releases, however that is much later
in the game.
Firstly those of us interested enough need to harness our knowledge
skills & expertise of compiled programming languages like ANSI C
or Modula-2 / Pascal or SCHEME etc to discuss & develop an interpreter
for a small subset of REBOL/Core, probably the natives!, datatypes!
& operators! from which everything else is built upon.
However I digress, those sort of discussions are for the OSCAR project
to decide, the purpose here is to stimulate opinion, enthusiasm, critique
& hopefully momentum for such a project.
Project 2 - REEMACS
REEMACS Rebol Extensible Environment MACroS
REEMACS Rebol Engineered EMACS
REEMACS Rebol Engineered Environment Makes Advanced Computing Simple
As the name suggests the intention here is to create an advanced extensible
editor & environment written entirely in REBOL built on a REBOL interpreter.
View GUI versions & Command versions could be developed later.
REEMACS would be an advanced editor & environment extensible with REBOL
functions, macros & scripts, in the spirit of Richard Stallman's GNU EMACS
but bettered by applying REBOL human-centric principals & features including
a more intuitive & easy to use interface whilst retaining all the power &
flexibility that REBOL provides.
In short REEMACS would be a state of the art Editor / Environment for the
21st Century including;
* Advanced Text Editing & Formatting
* File & Directory Control
* Diary & Calendaring
* Email & FTP
* Language Syntax Highlighting
* Documentation & Help
* Everything else not yet thought of.......
As above the intention here is to stimulate interest & discussion about
a REEMACS project and call to arms for those REBOL Coders looking to
show off their REBOL skills on a project that can harness & collate the
combined skills & scripts of the REBOL Community to provide a generally
useful REBOL Utility.
There is no reason for REEMACS not to collaborate with other on going
projects such as REBMAIL to produce a world class REBOL application.
So there you have it OSCAR & REEMACS, they are my suggestions, now
Iam looking for your responses.
I would be obliged if all comments & discussion could be kept to this
list & all replies sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and not to me personally.
All the best,
Mark Dickson
