Nick, Are you taking donations for the work you did on the Rebol tutorial? I am really impressed by the scope and detail of what you have put together. It is by far one of the most detailed and practical guides to programming in ANY language, and I would love to contribute.
posted by: Joshua Litt 14-Jan-2013/13:40:36-8:00
Thanks Joshua - I would prefer that donations go to Saphirion and/or Nenad to support their current work on R3Droid and RED. I'm matching donations up to a certain level on both projects, because those tools wills pave the way to future REBOL capabilities. They both have published Paypal links on AltME
posted by: Nick 15-Jan-2013/20:55:19-8:00
To donate to Saphirion for Android and all open source R3 development: http://development.saphirion.com/donations/
To donate to Nenad Rakocevic (DocKimbel) for RED development: http://www.red-lang.org/p/donations.html
These guys are putting the money to productive use, and donating actually makes a difference in how much work is able to get completed in the immediate future.
posted by: Nick 16-Jan-2013/4:37:48-8:00
P.S. - the next evolution of the tutorial is called "Creating Business Applications With Rebol". It's available at http://re-bol.com/business_programming.html
That new tutorial contains a lot of new material, (and also eventually covers all the same topics as the old tutorial), but it is much more clearly organized in a way that leads directly towards what I believe is REBOL's most relevant purpose.`
posted by: Nick 16-Jan-2013/11:22:23-8:00
Thanks for the heads up, I will take a look. The future of REBOL is in good hands.
posted by: Joshua Litt 16-Jan-2013/13:32:39-8:00
Your new documentation is looking excellent again, Nick. I have agreed with many of the statements you make for many years.
posted by: Kaj 19-Jan-2013/16:03:37-8:00
Nick, you can upload the follwong code for your video lessons, it's a youtube playlist made only with your video:
posted by: MaxV 21-Jan-2013/11:16:32-8:00
Thanks Kaj - That article is still a work in progress. I'm Glad to hear some approval :)
MaxV, THANK YOU. That must've taken some time!
posted by: Nick 22-Jan-2013/1:48:09-8:00
I added a bunch of really practical sections today. Check out the intro CSV/parse section, the Paypal Reports example, and the sections about printing and bar codes.
I think it would fit nicely into a university curriculum somewhere.
posted by: Nick 22-Jan-2013/4:25:28-8:00
Just scanning the forum while I have my second breakfast, and I saw your comment, "what I believe is REBOL's most relevant purpose." I wonder if you would be willing to elaborate a bit. I think of it as similar to the Amiga. Carl showed that one could have a multi-tasking operating system in 256K but nobody listened and the Amiga died, and many years later microcomputers finally had multi-tasking operating systems. With REBOL, Carl showed that one can have a powerful programming tool in a small package, but nobody listened and REBOL did not die, but it seems never fully came to life.
Thank you.
posted by: Steven White 3-Oct-2013/10:18:37-7:00
Steven,
I have never found any computing tool more relevant or better suited for my needs than Rebol, and I think there are many people out there who could likely be just like me, but who've never experienced what I have, because Rebol is not popular. The fact that Rebol's not as popular as Python, Lua, VB, etc., hasn't changed it's value in my life. I simply couldn't have achieved many of the things in my life without it. The ability to create custom apps on any computing platform, with a ridiculously simple, fast, and productive development process is an extremely powerful and versatile ability to have in any active person's life. I've written some extraordinarily valuable software for business clients, in my *spare time*, and have been able to maintain and respond to feature requests instantly, even after not having seen code for months or years. And I spend most of my time doing things other than writing code. Rebol is just a tool that makes all the computers around me much more versatile than they could ever be using off-the-shelf software. I don't ever aspire to create a new web browser application or a new operating system. I just want to manage custom, personalized data, in a way that suits my workflow needs exactly. Being able to write simple, concise, readable code for simple custom apps that manage critical business and personal data will always be relevant. Carl called it "programming in the small", and I think that sort of outlook, to use computing devices to solve real life problems, is tremendously powerful. Rebol enabled the opportunity to open Merchants' Village, and has played a huge part in operating Rockfactory for nearly a decade. It's enabled me to create systems for clients who could not run their businesses without the systems I've put together for them. It's an intricate part of just about every activity I take part in, in every area of my life. It's the tool that allows me to use computers to manage human interaction in so many aspects of my life. If I had used other less productive tools, I would not have been able to create nearly as many useful applications for myself or for others. I simply could not have worked as quickly and completed as many applications over the course of my experience. That's why it's been relevant for me.
posted by: Nick 3-Oct-2013/22:50:35-7:00
P.S. - Rebol seems to have gotten a new lease on life as an open source project. The main tutorial page saw 15715 unique visitors in August, and all my rebol related pages together have had more than 100,000 views in the last month. I think with time, we'll see the community expand noticeably, now that the closed source barrier has been removed, and now that R3 for Android is available (keep in mind, it's not even in the Google Play Store yet...)