
REBOL 3 Source Code Released - itsuart
http://www.rebol.com/cgi-bin/blog.r?view=0519
======
tomcam
Politically incorrect question for Rebol jocks: Doesn't Red (<http://www.red-
lang.org/>) appear to have the vitality lost years ago by Rebol?

Am seriously not trying to be rude to Carl Sassenrath, Rebol's inventor. Just
discovered Rebol lately so am not very tuned in to the ecosystem. But Red has
been open source for some time, it appears to be dramatically faster, and
seems to be free of Carl's understandable urges to keep some kind of control
in an anarchic world?

I say this as someone trying to decide which one to invest my very limited
non-work time in one of these two very worthy projects.

~~~
andrewcooke
not sure if you're astro-turfing or really unaware of the difference, but in
its time rebol had the level of awareness of, say, the rust language now - not
something a lot of people used, but with a decent profile in the technical
press. a known, interesting, but unlikely to make it language. a class B if
you like.

in comparison, red is class C. it's new, has little awareness and little
coverage. it's even less likely to make it.

this is not a judgement on the merits of either language (although if you want
that, rebol's syntax aware approach looks more interesting to me than anything
red has to offer), just trying to give a historical perspective: rebol _was_
bigger than red is now and, i suspect, still has more users, even now. on the
other hand, rebol is clearly heading down while red can only go up.

~~~
andrewcooke
oh, sorry - above is wrong if red is derived from rebol. sorry again.

------
andrewcooke
apache licence. <https://github.com/rebol/r3/blob/master/LICENSE> isn't that
significantly more free than rebol in the past? edit: yes, the original rebol
licence didn't allow modification. <http://www.rebol.com/license.html>

------
itsuart
Repo: <https://github.com/rebol/r3>

------
lucian1900
Sadly, this is perhaps too late. This would've been much better timed when
Rebol was more popular.

It is very, very cool, however.

~~~
itsuart
Looks like REBOL community was quite seclusive: they weren't using web nor IRC
to communicate, but AltME[1]. So, who knows what will happen, when they "come
out".

>It is very, very cool, however

Agree. It feels* like if Clojure is a Lisp done right, then REBOL is a
metacircular scripting done right.

[1] <http://www.altme.com/>

* It's just feeling, no intention to start holywar.

------
adamnemecek
The wikipedia description makes it seem like it's cat's pajamas. Has anyone
coded in this? If so, what's your experience?

~~~
sixdimensional
I wrote a small email client in Rebol in 2001, it could download email via POP
and send via SMTP directly via the protocols and a socket.

It was a TINY program and it worked cross platform due to the fact that there
was a web client for Rebol. I actually used it in production just for myself.
Amazingly, I just googled my name and Rebol and found the mailing list
archives where I was asking about the project... ah, the power of the web's
institutional memory!

Rebol (the language) took a bit of getting used to because the syntax was more
functional in nature (although it is note a pure functional language). I had
just come from working on some C++ and CGI/Perl programs so it was pretty
different. It was a fun experiment to stretch the mind.

Honestly, I hadn't given Rebol a thought since I just saw this post... nice to
know it's still alive and well.

The book (still have it on the shelf) I first used as a reference was "Rebol:
The Official Guide".

~~~
sixdimensional
Looking back I recall this article I read in 2005, it was interesting to note
it had some similarities to the way data is expressed in JSON and similar ways
to declare functions that we now use in javascript (myfunc = function(input) {
}, etc.). JSON was released in RFC 4627 in 2006 - the timing and similarity is
interesting.

<http://www.rebol.com/article/0206.html>

~~~
tomcon
Not an accidental similarity, Douglas Crockford credits Rebol as an influence
for json.

<https://erikeldridge.wordpress.com/tag/crockford/>

------
mhd
Erm, _interesting_ style of in-line documentation, with the function
declaration embedded in the comment block. Also, alphabetically enumerated
(categorized?) source files.

------
iso-8859-1
Where can I find stuff implemented with REBOL? Stuff like factorial, a web
server, Unix tool implementations.

~~~
onetom
A pretty full featured web server: <http://cheyenne-server.org/>

But I also built an infrastructure configuration server from the 2kB
<http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=webserver.r> to avoid
LDAP/Chef/Puppet and similar bloatwares.

What do you consider a Unix tool? File and directory handling and serial port
access just as HTTP/IMAP/POP/SMTP clients are all built in. See
<http://www.rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore-12.html> and
<http://www.rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore-13.html>

Instead of lex/yacc it provides the parse function and instead of grep it also
provides the parse function (with a more readable BNF-like syntax, which is
less effective to write for very small hacks, thats true).

------
albertzeyer
I am reading about Rebol the first time now. And I have some problems to
understand what exactly it is.

Just a scripting language like Python but with some more stuff included,
mainly a cross-platform feature-rich GUI framework? And a very own syntax...

Or more like an embedded programmable VM like Smalltalk?

Also, <http://www.red-lang.org> was mentioned here (and I also haven't heard
about it before). How does that compare?

~~~
skrebbel
It's a programming language + standard library. The particular feature of
REBOL that makes is special is the ease with which you can define your own DSL
within the limits of the REBOL lexer. This allows libraries for specific
purposes, such as making UIs or parsing text, to be very succinct yet
readable.

A bit Lisp-y but with a stronger focus on what in Lisp would be macros.

When first published, REBOL was way ahead of its time, having explicit support
for a variety of well-designed DSLs before the term DSL even existed (or at
least, was widely known). The downsides of REBOL always were its closed source
commercial model and the lack of a strong community as a (probable) result
therefore, plus the fact that by default, the UIs made by the built-in UI
library look absolutely horrible, which isn't a big problem really but helps
scare newcomers away.

That one first downside seems to have been taken away now.

A nice REBOL showcase is, IMHO, it's oneliner page:

<http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html>

Plus the (excellent) associated commentary on some mailing list:

[http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-
Mon-20091109/0545...](http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-
Mon-20091109/054578.html)

------
abecedarius
Wonder if this code has survived into this version:
<http://ll1.ai.mit.edu/marshall.html>

Added: no: <https://github.com/akavel/sherman>

