Rebol 3 Bazaar
I've been quiet for a long while, and this blog is not easy for me to write.
I'm sitting here with a glass of 2013 Ferrarelle mineral water of the glass bottle... hoping to be inspired on how to write this...
No, bad introduction...
You know that Rebol is a fantastic programming language, but its development was discontinued and bad supported. A lot of people when encounter Rebol falls in love for its simplicity, a blend of theory, experimentation, and invention, the language embodies elegant and wonderful concepts and properties. It was and is the most productive language I've ever used. I hope your experience has been similar.
Unfortunately a lot of bad events are leading Rebol to a no through road:
-no direction of the new Rebol3
-no a central site open for discussion
-no updates on Rebol 3 source (well, just one every month)
-too many sites about Rebol and with no updates from years
These and other reasons forced me to create http://rebol.informe.com/portal.html a public forum, with a public wiki and a blog, where everybody can contribute. The result is just 17 users, this means that Rebol is dying; the cathedral way of Rebol 3 development is not working.
So I'm forced by my love for Rebol to create a new GitHub repository: Rebol 3 Bazaar, it's a Rebol 3 source, with graphic working (VID, but just on windows at the moment); I promise you:
-pull requests and issues discussed and merged in 24 hours (or max a week)
-open to add people to its organiziation
-always update!
-https://github.com/angerangel/r3bazaar
If you like to contribute write me, use GitHub or Rebol portal; you don't need to be a programmer, think about a new logo, contribute the wiki.
If you know REBOLers who might be interested in this discussion, please let them know about this blog posting. I look forward to hearing from you,
-Max
posted by: MaxV 13-Feb-2013/6:13:34-8:00
QUOTING:- "The result is just 17 users, this means that Rebol is dying"
It's a "too little too late" situation. I don't see Rebol rising from its ashes.
How BIG is the Rebol community ? I guess you'd be lucky to have more than 100 people. Does anyone have an official number ? even some, small, obscure, one man driven, BASIC dialects out there, have more than a 100 user community.
In my case, I moved to a different language anyway, guess most have done the same. It was obvious back then, that Rebol was a lost cause. Sometimes you have to let your mind overrule your heart.
good luck anyway.
posted by: let's face reality 18-Feb-2013/11:01:49-8:00
Rebol is nice but it would become completely free in order to have success. I know it is very hard for the creator of the language but he could find a way of creating profit in another way! Rebol is the language of the future today! And it is a problem for the language. Great semantics, great syntax ! It is by far the most elegant networked programming language! Rebol will be with us for long!
posted by: anasdrak 19-Feb-2013/14:36:27-8:00
The people who use REBOL are much happier than the other millions out there :) REBOL applications that I've written have generated millions of dollars in income, and run a number of large, complex, successful business operations. REBOL is not popular, but that doesn't change what it's able to do. All the fundamental capabilities are there to manage business data. That's all that has ever mattered, for people who are smart enough to use it to do productive work. If you want to get a programming job, then by all means, dedicate yourself to spending the next few decades writing C, Java, and whatever horribly painful tools become most popular. Or maybe wait for Red ;)
I don't give one shake how popular REBOL is. For my purposes, there's never been any tool more productive, and my life would have been much worse if I hadn't taken that little REBOL pill.
posted by: Nick 19-Feb-2013/22:47:03-8:00
Thank you for your support, I received quite all cheering emails and I promise to answer all you as soon as possible. As you can see at the moment I'm trying to add all pull requests pending on Rebol 3, I added:
* Brian Hawley multi-script support, and better support for length-specified embedding
* ladislav suggestion of using David M. Gay's dtoa for molding decimals
* earl fix of select bug (see http://issue.cc/r3/1936)
* CCX fix of trim function
* earl fix of recursive make call
See https://github.com/angerangel/r3bazaar for more informations.
See: http://rebol2.blogspot.it/2013/02/rebol-3-bazaar-evolution.html for cool video and images.
As Hugo pointed out, each of you would have some area of interest where a Rebol article might be accepted for publication. Accounting, for example. An article in an accounting magazine could draw a dozen new members. Rebol doesn't need coders, needs enthusiasts! The challenge being to write a solid article that speaks to that market.
posted by: MaxV 21-Feb-2013/8:19:52-8:00
QUOTING:- "The result is just 17 users, this means that Rebol is dying"
@nick not trying to be picking a fight with you, my original post was in response to the original post from maxv who seemed to be surprised and dejected why he had only 17 users. this looks normal to me, coming from a such small user base for the language. out of 100 users ??, what percentage would normally register. did he expect 100% of the userbase to register at his site ? I referred to "other" obscure basic language in my original comment, for the reason, I had just visited another BASIC site, just before browsing this one, and there were more than 17 users on the forum.
on another note, i believe in your case, you are a business man first, who is making use of a "tool" to meet your business needs. It would not have mattered even if rebol did not exist, you would have still made your millions even using a different language. unfortunately the majority of developers are not as business savvy as you.
No offense meant, you said you made millions with rebol, as the highest income earner (all categories) using rebol - which is a remarkable achievement by itself -. With Java, since you mentioned Java, the highest income earner (again all categories) are making billions of dollars. Many individual programmers using other language are also making millions of dollars.
what I mean by that, it is not the language that brings the money, it is how a language is used, how does someone or an organization make the most of their available all round skills that determine the millions or billions of dollars revenue.
sorry for the long and delayed clarification w.r.t my original post.
posted by: let's face reality 29-Mar-2013/9:33:56-7:00
@ let's face reality: thanks for the kind clarification, but really no offence taken. I've always just hoped that others wouldn't be frightened away from REBOL so easily because of it's low scores in the popularity contest. I'm sure there are others for whom it's also a perfect fit.
posted by: Nick 30-Mar-2013/10:15:10-7:00
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