Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Language Advances
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 6/27/2000; 5:59:19 PM Topic: Language Advances Msg #: 18196 (In response to 18195) Prev/Next: 18195 / 18197
Paul Howson: And what about Rebol? Rebol appears to be an interesting language which attempts to bring together many good ideas from other languages, as well as a number of innovations. It makes claims to being very "internet ready". I'm only partway through reading the docs and have run some of the sample code.Rebol looks good on the basis of compactness, but only strikes me as being more "Internet ready" than Java on the basis of having built-in support for some popular protocols; it doesn't appear to make distributed programming largely transparent in the fashion that Oz or JoCaml do.
Philosophically, I think Rebol gave up on objects prematurely, and it doesn't seem to unify other programming approaches such as logic programming or constraint programming; it's basically procedural programming with a nod to functional programming.
Finally, I completely disagree with Rebol's designer that wholesale syntactic extension ("dialects") is a good idea, especially in the absence of hygiene in the sense of Scheme's "hygenic macros."
Bottom line: Rebol strikes me as a very nice tool for a single programmer to get a lot of stuff done that involves a lot of currently-existing protocol while writing very little code, and this makes it a Good Thing. I'm not convinced that it represents an advancement of the state of the art, and can think of some respects (again, mostly revolving around syntactic extension) in which it seems like a Bad Thing.
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