The appeal of Rebol

[GedB]

I'm curios how many others are like me.  With a full time job, family and ongoing education I have a tiny bit of time for programming for pleasure.  I have to make every second count.

This was why I became frustrated with Java.  Java, at first, seem lovely but before long the small project creates a large amount of source files all of which need maintaining.

If you want to write anything worth while you have to start fretting about version control and built scripts and all the rest of it.

With Rebol you can just refactor away code, building up the levels of abstraction so that as you add functionality the overall number of lines doesn't increase by that much.

[Edoc]

I'm in the same boat. I have a family & I work 50+ hours per week.

I was attracted to REBOL because of "simplicity", but I discovered what I actually wanted was "ease of use." In the process, I learned a whole lot about REBOL and programming in general.

I'm a manager, not a programmer, but in my role I get to write batch scripts & quick utilities. REBOL enables me to keep vendors honest-- they often want to charge $20k for things REBOL can do in 20 lines.  

[DefiantPc]

50 + hours and then some...

I stumbled across REBOL while looking for a cross platform solution and while it has great potential and it's alot of fun,
I find that i can't invest the time needed to learn the ins and outs.

Hmm... Now that I think about it I have been mucking about trying to learn  REBOL when I should be focusing on the business.

:blink:
Even now I'm wasting valuable time...

Argh...



 

[CarlRead]

To me, the appeal of REBOL is more about saving my software than saving time.  After moving from platform to platform to platform (etc.) over my 20 years of computing, there's a lot of software I've coded I can't use any more, short of running an emulator of the OS it was written for on my PC.

I want to get away from software's that's dependant on any specific hardware or OS.  REBOL, at least originally, offered that possibility.  RT has obviously found it a struggle to keep up support of the large batch of OSs it originally aimed at, but I'm sure they'll at least support the major ones in the future if it's within their means to do so.

Currently I use AmigaOS, Windows and Linux.  It's nice to be able to write a script on any of them and know it should look and work the same on all my OSs.  And since my Windows and Linux run on the same machine, my REBOL directory is shared by both OSs, thus my REBOL scripts are the same on either OS - not copies.  This also is a time-saver.  If I modify a script while in Windows it's modified in Linux as well.