Andrew, you must be religious.
You believe in the Perfect Rebol!
I don't care what feature it is or
whether it's working broken or just weird,
you have to understand it and imagining the
perfect rebol won't do me a bit of good.
Also, I find the claim that Rebol is significantly
like a human language to be a bunch of marketing bull.
It is true that dialects may prove to be powerful
and helpful, but they still don't make much difference
regarding a natural human language. Rebol is not
and never will be like a human language. I don't mind
that actually, and I am not surprised. Unless RT
plans to invent AI that really works, there is
no way any computer could understand a natural
human language. Also, frankly, for the kind of
work most of us do, we prefer the precision of
our computers following a correct recipe to the
powers and foibles of a human language. People
invent special languages all the time for a certain
domain where they need precision. Some mathematical
languages are great for math but nobody would call
them natural languages...
Anyway, that gets tiresome. Believe what you will
about Reb and nat lang.
If you think Rebol is especially confusing to C
programmers, that's too bad. I think it's pretty
much confusing to everybody, but a little lisp
or logo or scheme may be more help than harm.
Actually, since the implementors of Rebol are swimming
mentally in C code all day long, it may sometimes affect their
thinking and first impulses, but how could that be helped?
Well, keep the faith!!!
-Galt
>= Original Message From [EMAIL PROTECTED] =
>Galt wrote:
>> I hate to disagree with people that are smarter than me, but I seriously
>think you are underestimating what it takes to really understand rebol,
>especially for those less brilliant.
>
>I don't think I'm that smart, Galt. Even though I did take a online IQ test
>recently and it assigned me a score of 150 for IQ (I think the test is
>broken).
>
>> I generally find that most of my knowledge of other computer systems to
>gain insight into rebol is quite helpful and revealing. Even having the
>context to say, this is like scheme or logo in rebol, but that is like some
>other language, etc. is all helpful.
>
>This doesn't help much for Rebol. Unless you've examined as many languages
>as Carl has.
>
>> So, yes, it is true that rebol is different in important ways from other
>languages and therefore you will have to gain a new understanding. But this
>notion that you would be better off starting from a point of total ignorance
>and then everything would be easy is patently absurd.
>
>I was hindered by my knowledge of other languages. Coming from a point of
>view of innocence, knowing only human languages, is better I feel.
>
>> When I have trouble with Rebol, if I was a less knowledgeable user I would
>probably just give up. Being able to make some guesses about possible causes
>or solutions is much better.
>
>> So, the best way really, is for Rebol to tell us how it works inside.
>When you know how rebol lists really work, and string literals and contexts
>and words, then you understand rebol. Ignorance or innocence isn't much
>help.
>
>I disagree. The model that Rebol is based on is close to natural human
>language. Knowing that and knowing nothing of computer languages is the best
>way to learn Rebol. Rebol works literally as it is. Discussing in depth,
>contexts and how they work are almost meaningless, particularly when some
>parts of Rebol are still buggy and need to fixed. I thinking of the GC bug,
>hopefully that's fixed in the experimental builds.
>
>> Obviously, one should try never to allow preconceptions and prejudice to
>inhibit understanding, and that is true of everything, not just Rebol.
>
>Change can be hard, but after the change, you wonder, what was the trouble?
>
>> I am not a stupid person, even if I am not a genius. I only got this far
>with Rebol because I am doggedly persistent, not because I have the
>pleasantly uncluttered mind of an infant.
>
>You're basically trying hard to learn the detail, without knowing rebol.
>
>> I really like and respect you Andrew, and I appreciate all the work you
>have done for Rebol and the members of the list. I just didn't want to let
>this go by yet again...
>
>> Now, this doesn't mean that I am anti-Rebol or want to be critical or
>whatever. We all love Rebol and want to use it as much as possible! I
>still don't know how forgetting everything I know is going to help me figure
>out just what the heck read-io really does and why timeouts don't seem to
>work as advertised for downloading big files...
>
>There's no need to learn 'read-io. We're encouraged not to as it's only a
>temporary cure. As for timeouts, this is again a problem with the Rebol
>implementation, not the perfect Rebol.
>
>> I will tell you, one of the joys of using Rebol is that it's so much nicer
>than other languages in many areas. If you didn't know something about them
>you pro
