REBOL not popular

[marketre]

the question is: what background information does a newbie have to know before he learns Rebol?
as we all know by now that Rebol is heavily influenced by Lisp and Forth. for a new learner he would ask himself "would it help if I studied Lisp or Forth first?" I think the answer is probably going to be a positive one. so how does a guy go about getting to know Lisp? hmmm, he' gotta know some college math first, lambda, er, what?
for languages like basic, perl, java, c, they present users with real life analogies: he could have "commands" that controls some memory space, he could manipulate "objects" that can talk to other "peer" or "parent" objects, program is just series of "procedures" as in a receipe....so on. so what does he, the newbie, has to know before he learns these languages? basic desire to control a machine perhaps. not a lot.
are the masses ready for an another "programmable programming language"?
I hate to say this but, if you want a thing to be used by everybody, you might wanna dumb is down a little.

[Graham]

Sorry, that's the straw man argument.

I know of guys who teach youngsters Rebol in their classes .. so your assumptions are incorrect.

[RebolBert]

for a new learner he would ask himself "would it help if I studied Lisp or Forth first?" I think the answer is probably going to be a positive one.

Conversely, I think REBOL could be help to study LISP (and, maybe, FORTH - but I don't know anything about the latter).

I think REBOL, like LISP and its "family" (Scheme, newLisp, Logo, etc.), is more "real life" and intuitive than BASIC or C (less functionnal and less procedural in fact).

REBOL is easy to learn for a perpetual newbie (as me). It's not true for Basic, Java, Perl or C ... or Lisp too. It's not a new programming language, it's a new language and it allows me to talk even with a machine without tormenting my mind.
 :mellow:I like newLISP too

Like LOGO, REBOL must be an excellent language for learning or training into programming.

 -_-

[Gabriele]

"would it help if I studied Lisp or Forth first?" I think the answer is probably going to be a positive one.

Actually, that would probably just harm. Learning many languages helps you become a master programmer; but to learn REBOL you just need to learn REBOL.

[henrikmk]

I had the experience of being a PHP/C/Javascript programmer before I turned to REBOL, and I did not feel it was an advantage. It felt like starting over again.

I think it's probably easier to ignore those languages to learn REBOL.

[marketre]

ok ok, rebol is afterall a product, don't you want to know how people who first came to use it perceive the product?
For me I was presented with a short and sweet tutorial, it all started off nice and easy, the mail-sending one-liner, no include/with/import, one-file-does-it-all(almost), if you are clever enough you'd carry it in a usb key ring and call all the rebol bots on the net and brought down sivilisation by then.
but few days later Rebol's amazing depth came to me rather as a "nasty" surprise, I didn't know what function language really means(do I need it?), also I found out there are apparently many undocumented language features, using /system/object/..... to toggle something behind the scene is one of them....
so my suggestion to the inventor of the language is that, don't hide it and tell us precisely what it offers and if it does exactly what it says on the tin.
you see, English is A language but Latin, no matter how beautiful it might be and is still widely used in certain area, is now a TOY language! so give us the meaty juicy staff upfront,  let those one-liners be the pleasant surprise LATER.

[Gabriele]

There are many levels of documentation... and REBOL is a bit lacking in the "deep" level. We have generally avoided the problem with the mailing list, where you can also find discussions about the deep issues.

But, there is no dubt that documentation needs to cover more areas.

[henrikmk]

The Wikibook, available here is an attempt at bringing in a different perspective to REBOL, written by experienced users.

Many of the pitfalls that we suffered through will eventually go into this book, so I highly recommend that if you find something that is not easily obtained through documentation, it should be added to the book.

[robertl]

I've been reading many posts about Rebol lack of popularity SINCE YEARS and It really strikes me that you are in the dark. I REALLY would like to use Rebol, it's a wonderfull language but it's really missing INTEROPERABLE FEATURES: today professional development are made in VB, DOTNET or JAVA no way to switch in Rebol except if Rebol could be interoperate with these languages.

For examples I would like to use Rebol as a parser engine in so I would need Rebol as DLL not as an executable. I would need to embed Rebol like Flash but it's impossible.

So I'm sorry there's no way I can use Rebol actually except for fun at home. I don't understand why the examples above are not striking such a genious mind as Carl. He needs to focus more on Enterprise and market needs.

[jbramble]

I have encountered two reasons why Rebol has not become more popular.   One reason is that I have used it for internet transfers of large quantities of data.  Numerous problems have occurred with the implementation, most of which are related to errors inherent in network communications (connections being lost due to timeouts).  The users think the rebol program has failed, when it was the network that failed.  The second reason is that java/c++/perl programers just don't believe a program can be that succinct, and be a real program.  It reminds me of how people used to dismiss Forth programming.

[ssandrew]

Little or no corporate acceptance, marketing efforts/muscle etc  and newbies unable to learn about Rebol in universities / tiertiary educational institutes have prevented Rebol from gaining market share.  The problem is the competition is being held in the western computing world ie. US and Europe. 

I wonder if Rebol is being promoted in China, would it do better as China might be considered virgin territory (ie. many new programmers who are learning their first programming language,  universities could be encouraged to teach REBOL, companies and government departments have urgent needs to build information systems). Note also that the Chinese government is actively promoting Linux  platform  as an alternative to Microsoft software systems. Assistance, grants and tax incentives are available for software companies/developers. 

The Chinese are practical and industrious people.  In these times when they are in a great hurry to develop infrastructure, Rebol could gain wide acceptance as (in my opinion) Rebol is a simpler, small and effective language with the potential to be its own operating system (ie. not living on top of  .Net, Java or Parrot).  Last but not least, software development costs in China can be much cheaper.

REBOL inc. should seriously look at carrying out the competition in China, India and Africa where software budgets are smaller.  No man is a prophet in his home town.  When successful overseas, Rebol can then return home to the western world.

[Reboludo]

When Rebol will be ported on Dotnet and Mono platform I will use it in professional context: today language alone is useless in professional context, all the libraries are as if not more important.

So I hope that one day you have the Gotcha of realising that's THE number one problem of problem. The mass of people won't learn and use Rebol if it doesn't help them to find a job for example. Java have been learned by many because they know for sure it will be usefull for their career.

Many can insist on building  a Tower of Babel.

Just let no one forget that the Tower of Babel was based on fear of a Great Flood, and related hypothetical wrong reasons and ambitions.

Fear and greed  lead to confusion. Languages got thereby confused then,  and still do so nowdays.

Operating  Systems and overly-complex impracticalities of all sorts are never finished until they become obsolete, for nothing is absolutely indispensable; yet anything can be useful.

Who can swim in a swimming pool can do in an ocean. The issue is balance of  purpose and vastness.

And, precisely, because of the vastness of purpose and the lack of purpose in vastness, there will never be a formula that any one can claim to hold.

But no one  is forbidden from trying.