Preaching Rebol to the masses

[fhein]

This morning I started thinking about the possibilities of increasing the popularity of Rebol. I ended up pondering about which groups of people who might actually be interested in learning a new programming language. What kind of people do you see as potential users, and how can we market Rebol to them? My thoughts follow...

Experienced computer users age 20+. I think there's a possibility of some penetration in this group. If someone know several programming languages they probably think they have the tools to solve problems already though. You don't get much "for free" if you know the most common languages, since it's soo different from C++, Java, Python, VB, asm etc. I think we need to come up with even better examples of how to easily solve real problems with Rebol, possibly with side-by-side comparison to other languages.

Computer users, all ages (not programmers). Rebol might have a chance because you don't need to know how a computer works to use it, and you're not required to try to think like a computer to write programs. But do these people even want to learn programming? Probably not. They want applications that does stuff for them. Maybe we can get them to download Rebol if there are some killer apps. For example the people who use Ubuntu might be interested, since we're cross platform. I think simplicity, and reducing obstacles, is a key issue here. It must be really easy to download and install Rebol. Put a huge button on rebol.com that say's "DOWNLOAD" and after that you shouldn't have to do anything more than selecting your OS and maybe your language. We need more killer apps though.

Hardcore computer users below 20. I think this should actually be our focus group! People who are interested in computers and who wants to learn how to do stuff, but doesn't know how yet. I know how I was like this age.. I wanted to make my computer (Amiga 500 at the time) do magic stuff, and I didn't give a rats ass if C++ would give me a job in 10 years. I wanted the cool stuff to happen immediately, not read thick books before I could get even a pixel on screen. Computer programs have changed alot since then though, and kids are definitely harder to impress these days. I think Rebol needs alot more visual power and bling! Gettings stuff from web pages and sending emails might be useful, but it's not something you bring your friends over to show off. Awesome 3D (and some 2D too) is! Think computer demos, real games and winamp visualizations instead! I'm sure lots of kids learned LUA because they wanted to modify, or even create own, mods for World of Warcraft. Maybe Rebol could be suitable as scripting engine for a block buster game some day?

People who hate Windows. Sure, Windows is becoming more useful with (almost) every version, but there are still alot of us who don't like using it. I've been longing for ages for binary portable applications, so I could gradually move to another platform. Oh my, did AmigaDE get my hopes up or what.. Anyway, I want these programs I can use now that I'm running Windows (since I'm kinda' addicted to Photoshop and Team Fortress 2) but then some day discover: Hey, I can switch to whichever OS I want to and keep running all my current applications! But for this to happen we need real applications and games. Currently I think Rebol 2 feels quite limited. It's definitely good at what it's doing, and it has a lot of untapped potential, but I'm not even going to start trying to write a Photoshop replacement in it. I don't know alot about Rebol 3, but atleast I hope it will change this

[btiffin]

Nice article.

I'd add targets of small to medium business, web designers, web hosters, writers,
scientists, busy people, sales people, and now I'm getting too limited or I'll be rambling for pages.

Lots of targets, but at the same time, with a focus.

Cheers

[fhein]

But how do we get these people you mention to start using Rebol? Can a small/medium business take the risk of investing time and money into a barely known language? Do busy people have time to learn something new? Can sales people do anything more advanced with a computer than write a word document (and most of them aren't even good at that!)?

Those you mention would definitely benefit from using Rebol, no question about that. But how should we market it to each of them specifically?

[DefiantPc]

But how do we get these people you mention to start using Rebol?

One way to interest your target industry is by example, give them a access to a series of use pre- configured scripts or tools that are beneficial to their industry so they can see how Rebol could be of use to them.

For example we develop inter/intra - net applications if there were Rebol scripts that were developed specifically for whm/Cpanel you could target approximately 90% of web hosts, widgets like Google widgets  integrated with Ajax and or RSS feeds have great possibilities for both web hosts and internet developers.

For example I really need a application that allows my clients to manipulate their images, size crop etc...
If this were a widget that could be integrated with desktop applications I distribute and from clients online editors I would be exstatic!

Have I considered it in Reb. Of course, do I have the time to develop in in Reb. not at the moment but if their was a Reb. widget that did these thing , and was freely distributable so I could modify and distribute it with my applications I would certainly dig in to modify it and integrate it with my application and perhaps learn a bit of the
language in the process...

-Mj.

[btiffin]

Re; the small to medium business angle...  business information management
I've done some small scripts for managing general (construction) contractor info.

Show a boss a utility they can "own" and let them ask for features as they go; features that can usually go in in minutes or hours, not days.  Mix the data with the code and let them feel in control of their own destiny, powerful things can happen.

REBOL is sooo, close.  Hand a boss a

REBOL []
    project [
        "The Jones Reno" [
            12-mar-2008 "change porch light to Mason/Bluth Classic"
                estimate $100.00 final none
            12-mar-2008 "fire bob"
            13-mar-2008 "hire tom" as TomB  wage $14.00
                alert 19-mar-2008 "Finish Tom's paperwork"
        ]
        "The Cavendish Place" [
            contact Rose "555-1212" alert 22-mar-2008 "Call" Rose
    ]
]

text file and they can see whats going on.

Tell them they can't use $10,000.00 for an estimate and the simplicity of that user interface becomes less attractive.  Now a layer has to be placed between the user and REBOL.  Too bad.  When a Boss sees the power of it, but feels like they can be defeated and made to feel a little bit dumb by a mistaken quote or a comma,  sad.  REBOL (without an application "filter") remains just out of reach of many.  What could have been a short day of dialecting (perhaps with a gui control panel) now becomes an application effort. An app that may well not get funded by a small shop or a sole proprietor that wants to build basements not databases.

I'd like to see giro  garbage in REBOL out  so that something as simple as

load %file  would not trip on the lexical scanner.  Convert all illegal symbols to string! or somesuch.  Now the Boss can plop in whatever they want into their personally developed dialect, some entries may bungle but the app continues with a small dent instead of an abort.  This would make REBOL far more accessible to the masses. imho.  A one hour contract every now and then to do a new report versus 5 days setting up a report generator framework and interface layer and then playing data entry clerk.  That part is where I think the Boss knows they don't "own" their solution, some nerd does.

So until then, we need programmers to pump out one-offs for "people" and/or toolkits for "developers" and as many general purpose apps as we can.  I look forward to a day when REBOL itself is the tool and all the little validator forms and per-app interfaces go away.  Text editor and >>  and let the user take over. With a little advanced dialecting on the side for payday.

Rambling,
Brian

[henrikmk]

But how do we get these people you mention to start using Rebol?

By far the most efficient way right now is simply make a live demo of the language starting with a friend coming to you with a real life problem they need to solve, and then solve it for them in REBOL. I've had a few of these, where I'd converted them in just 2-3 hours from heavy doubt in this unknown language to just "wow". The wow moments are important for a language like this and it was a live demo wow moment that immediately sparked my interest in the language 7 years ago.

Reading pages and pages and pages of descriptions of the language will convert no-one. I've tried that too, as I'd heard a lot about the language and read some tutorials in an old Amiga magazine, but it absolutely didn't click for me until I had that live demo (which was just trying the effects lab in the Viewtop). I had also only read about REBOL, because I knew Carl had done the Exec kernel in AmigaOS and knew there might be something special in there, but I didn't see it initially.

What's far harder is to turn a big company inside out to get them to get interested in REBOL, despite live demos. It's far easier to do that on a personal level and have the individual administrators, developers and generally tech savvy parts of the company know what this is about. You can be sure that most executives will not understand it, unless it has something about saving money on the bottom line. But if you can get just 1 or 2 people in each company to know REBOL, then the picture might change in the long run, because one day, they may be promoted to a position that gives them the power to decide to use it in the company.

It's much better in the end to have some dedicated followers that can spread the message virally through live demos, than to bombard the masses with hard to understand information about the language. I don't bother with demographics other than push it to people you know will understand the values it presents.

[fhein]

I'm writing some Rebol scripts at work to automate some tedious tasks (connecting to Tetra switches and downloading logs, checking status of all radio base stations etc.) but so far I haven't been able to interest someone else in learning the language. But if I get another job some day, I'm sure atleast someone will have to learn Rebol if they want to continue using those scripts

[-pekr-]

Here's my general reply:

For quite some time we can see various reactions in public about how RT does not know what the REBOL is, where to head its development, etc. And of course - yes, RT did some marketing wrong in the past. So what is current state of affairs?

I am talking to Carl often and we discuss stuff like REBOL priorities, marketing, what REBOL is, or what REBOL should become. My recent understanding is, that Carl knows it very well. If you want to know big picture (my understanding, not Carl's words), we want to have lightweight platform for distributed applications.

First thing RT had to take care of was to share developer's efforts. And it was not possible with monolithic R2 design. Hence R3 project was started. R3 is completly new design, with most parts being open-sourced, in order for the community to being able to contribute to the development process. The only part RT is keeping closed source is rebol kernel library, which is platform independent, so relatively easy for RT to compile for new target platforms. This library is both statically and dynamically linkable to third party applications.

Of course we don't want R3 to be used with your third party IDEs, but we want R3 becoming full fledged development and operational platform. And we will get there. Maybe slowly, but we surely will get there. Once recent Unicode integration is finished and some components are being put back into the kernel, I hope that R3 host parts are going to be uploaded into the DevBase. Even nowadays, in terms of r3-alpha AltME world, ppl are able to cooperate with Carl on C level directly. DevBase should speed-up some porting efforts and new modules creations.

Last but not least - View. Some of us don't need View, so R3 Core will be fine here. But we have some strong plans for View too. New View engine uses AGG rendering and is many times faster in some areas than R2 View was. Rich text is now available too. New VID, VID3, is complete rewrite of engine utilising new View kernel capabilities plus 8 years of our experience with VID2 and its limitations. And it is going to be really cool - no limits. View is becoming yet-another-gui-toolkit-out-there, just like Qt, WxWidgets, etc., are. Will it be competitive to those other toolkits? I hope so, and more so as it still keeps REBOL under 1MB. What other language has something like that?

My personal ambitions are high. There is Flash, Silverlight (although requiring .Net), and R3/View - we are "Third to the game". My idea is, that once stable enough, we should imediatelly resurrect browser plug-in initiative. And why? Because browser is good deployment environment, it is kind of OS, a platform, a container for 3rd party technologies. And ppl are more relaxed to install plug-ins, than downloading and installing stand-alone apps. So, we will use "their" strategy to our's advantage.

To keep you guys informed, RT prepared R3 project page on rebol.com, so I think there is now enough information out there, on what is currently happening (plus blogs), and noone can imo complain anymore about RT's misscommunication. If you want to help, you can join us. And once DevBase host parts are out there, you can help even more publicly.

Cheers,
Petr

[fhein]

I'd love to be able to write my webpages in Rebol (both server and client) if they showed up in a normal webbrowser instead of requiring a separate viewer. People would be using Rebol without even knowing it, and I'm sure web developers would learn to love it

[notchent]

fhein,

I agree and think that the plugin should definitely be one of RT's most important projects.  Outside of using a few fundamental desktop applications, a huge portion of what average people do with their computers is surf the net.  The problem is getting people to know and trust Rebol enough to install the plugin to view content.  If they don't do that, then any content requiring the plugin is simply lost to vistors.  Until some significant advances in marketing and promotion occur, I'm sticking with Rebol through CGI - I still do prefer that to PHP or any other solution   I am going to keep hoping, though, for a day in the future when I can post a Rebol script and know that as many people are as likely to view it as a flash movie...