

D. Crockford on JSON: "An influence was Rebol, a shame it’s not more popular" - rebtut
http://www.dzone.com/links/the_making_of_json_by_douglas_crockford_an_influe.html
JSON had a lot of influences on its design. It didn’t just come out of my head. It’s based on a lot of things that I had observed over the years. The first – maybe the greatest – influence was Lisp. The thing that was brilliant about Lisp was it used exactly the same representation for programs and data. Originally, the idea was that you would have programs that could act on themselves as data, and do interesting things. … Another influence was Rebol. Rebol’s a more modern language, but with some very similar ideas to Lisp, in that it’s all built upon a representation of data which is then executable as programs. But it’s a much richer thing syntactically. Rebol is a brilliant language, and it’s a shame it’s not more popular, because it deserves to be.
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praptak
Rebol is 100% proprietary. To be popular it would have to offer a _huge_
advantage over all of the other decent free languages. As far as I know this
is not the case.

~~~
halo
I think a 'law' could be made out of that principle.

Any proprietary language has to be significantly better than its rivals to
gain traction, and if it does gain traction a free implementation or
alternative will eventually appear.

~~~
jerf
I think I'd have to add "general-purpose" into the mix. Complex proprietary
niche languages seem to be able to survive a long time without competition.
Especially true when the users of the proprietary language are not themselves
computer programmers and nobody has the skill to just start creating
competition. (Which is why mathematics does have some open options; there's
enough skill crossover to make things like Octave possible.)

~~~
dfranke
Octave is decent at what it does, but nothing in the open source world comes
remotely close to Mathematica. Having easy access to it (and more importantly,
being able to expect my peers to have the same) is one of the things I miss
most about being a student. Wolfram's recent price cut for non-student
personal use is alluring, though. Some time soon I might break down and pay
for it.

~~~
jerf
I wasn't claiming it was a replacement, just that it, well, _exists_. Other
proprietary areas don't have _any_ open source competition where the target
audience has even less overlap with "programmers".

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m_eiman
Link to actual content:
[http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...](http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford-
json)

~~~
jacobolus
Link to hacker news discussion when this video was first posted:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763165>

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gruseom
I've never looked properly into Rebol and don't want to take the time to do so
now. But if any HNers know about it, I'd be really interested in seeing a
couple of examples of how Rebol does code=data. Specifically, is there a
mapping between how Rebol represents code symbolically and how Lisp does it?

The OP did prompt me to take a look at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath>, which is actually pretty
interesting. I hadn't known about his work on operating systems and the Amiga.

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amalcon
Not a lot of info in the link, but <http://www.rebol.com/> seems as
comprehensive as the equivalents for other languages.

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middayc
rebol is very nice, my last 4 web-apps are done 100% in it

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TweedHeads
Crockford should stop claiming he invented JSON.

Brendan Eich did, JSON is Javascript, part of it, its own data structure, it
is javascript object notation.

What Crockford did was to spread its adoption among other languages, building
libraries and encouraging people to use them.

To Caesar what is Caesar’s...

~~~
wvenable
If you watch his talk he doesn't claim he invented JSON; he goes out of his
way to say he discovered it -- because it was already there. And he even says
that he wasn't the first to discover it either -- as many other people figured
it out around the same time.

~~~
TweedHeads
_"An influence was Rebol, a shame it’s not more popular"_

Then the title is misleading. Rebol as an influence to what?

We should ask that question to Brendan to see what influenced HIM to design
javascript as he did.

~~~
BigZaphod
Javascript is extremely heavily influenced by Self:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language)>

