How Goes It?
I'm at a bit of loss trying to see where R3 is at the moment. Theres Atronix Engineering and Saphirion, but don't know of any others. It does not seem that R3 has its own web site. Once it was suggested that some of the Rebol sites be taken over. But, perhaps R3 should stand on its own. Is there any interest in making a site for R3 to focus interest and communicate development?
posted by: Felix 9-Jul-2014/0:04:52-7:00
Hello Felix,
It's now coming up on the 1 year anniversary of the conference in Montreal after Rebol's open-sourcing. So it's a good time to reflect on what has happened in that time, relative to the plans that we were trying to firm up there.
The best way to sum things up is that attention is focused on Red development, and Rebol usage is largely in a holding pattern. New people coming to Rebol are doing so with the intent to jump on board with Red when it becomes more-or-less feature comparable to Rebol; and the zeitgeist (which in a self-fulfilling prophecy I am echoing here) is that is how one "should think".
While the peanut gallery likes to throw aggressive estimates or pessimistic estimates of time around...we can at least say that time for Red to reach feature parity is not 3 months and it's not 3 years. But assuming DocKimbel and Qtxie are not run over by buses, I'd place my bet in the middle--perhaps a year and a half.
I'm perhaps in a minority position of believing Rebol will continue to be relevant. Perhaps I am too attached to the logo design. But Rebol and Red represent a divergence in approaches: Red rejects conventional toolchains entirely, and Rebol bends over backwards to build on the widest spectrum of conventional tools it can.
My prediction is that the next wave of Rebol users will be people coming from Red. In some circumstances they may find it quite convenient to have something "like Red, but in ANSI-C" in their back pocket...for processing data and linking into systems. For this reason, I think taking the best ideas and making sure Rebol 3 and Red *agree* is a good strategic move.
Today it is largely Rebol Q&A and usage that is supporting the ecology, building awareness. But people who can program in C and could affect the Rebol3 core--myself included--have been discouraged by the lack of timely integrations on the main GitHub repository. Impassioned requests for the delegation of authority to people who could do those integrations have yet to be acted on.
Right now it's my personal opinion that the best thing that can be done is that people using Rebol do some deep thinking, to function as Red's "research wing". CureCode contains countless little dark corners, as well as pockets of potential untapped coolness, that *IF* they are vetted could be acted on quickly when the time is right for Red.
Anyway...StackOverflow is generally still the strongest of the daily dose of Rebol/Red you'll find...for now. There are people solving code challenges, an ergonomic Q&A, a "starred posts" list to catch up on interesting tidbits:
http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/info/291/rebol-and-red/?tab=stars
(And me ruminating more about icons and graphics, though I keep saying I'm going to retire from that responsibility. One day I will.)
So it's a good place for those interested in the issues to chime in.
posted by: Hostile Fork 9-Jul-2014/11:40:18-7:00
Thank you for the starred post list :)
posted by: Nicks 10-Jul-2014/13:30:43-7:00
One day Hostile Fork will retire, but we're glad to have him around until that comes to pass!
posted by: Chris 10-Jul-2014/16:11:08-7:00
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