what's wrong with REBOL?

[John Roth]

"Mike Henley" <mnhenley at msn.com> wrote in message
news:6005702b.0309020727.4ba46e78 at posting.google.com...
> I first came across rebol a while ago; it seemed interesting but then
> i was put off by its proprietary nature, although the core of the
> language is a free download.
>
> Recently however, i can't help but say i was totally impressed. I
> needed an open source wikiblog/wikilog, whatever you wanna call it,
> basically a hybrid of a blog and a wiki. I checked out snipsnap, which
> uses java, it was said on their site to be a clone of vanilla, a
> wikilog written with rebol. I wanted an open source thing so i could
> modify it to my needs.
>
> snipsnap turned out to be, even apparent on the first day of use, way
> too far from being mature and reliable, and although they said it
> doesn't require a server, it required a download of the sun java sdk,
> which, when installed, was well over 400Mbs of space on my hard drive.
> Not to mention another over 100Mbs for the JVM.
>
> So as i needed a mature enough solution, but liked the way snipsnap
> worked, i looked around, and on freshmeat i found vanilla, with a
> development status of 5; production/stable. I went to its site, where
> a working demo impressed with its capabilities. The site is though
> poorly documented, very poorly documented i had to use trial and error
> to work out how to install it. Anyhow, what impressed me was that the
> download, which was less than half a megabyte, installed vanilla,
> which is the wikilog, an apache server, and the rebol interpreter,
> which is the free download version. And it self-installed! It turned
> out to be a very very capable wikilog, and highly extensible. I am
> still amazed and impressed by it after a couple of days of use.
>
> Rebol itself seemed a very easy to read language. Sorta like ho
> readable SQL is. I might even say more readable than python or ruby,
> or at least as readable.
>
> I have the intention to learn it over the coming few days, at least to
> customize vanilla to my needs.
>
> So i ask you guys, what's wrong with Rebol? i mean other than it's
> proprietary nature. 'cos anyway, there are many commercial IDEs for
> open source languages, and if smitten enough i might even consider a
> rebol SDK. It just amazes me for how readable it is, how much it seems
> to enable to do with so little code, and the size and capability of
> the final solution.
>
> What's wrong with Rebol?

I don't know that there's anything "wrong" with it, other than
it's a special purpose language designed to fit in one niche,
and do its job well (at least in the eyes of its designers.)
I'm not about to download a humongous reference manual
to compare it with Python. If it serves your needs, go for it.

John Roth