Coming to the REBOL well

[old_mac]

I have spent a few days of my vacation reading about REBOL and trying to 'Forget everything I know about programming' but a line from an old Dylan song keeps running through my head.
"pump don't work cause the vandals stole the handle."

I have spent hours reading REBOL code, the most readable code I have ever read, but still I can't get a handle on REBOL.  I tried the simple 'blog.r' and it works..sort of...but gets hung up badly on the Mac due to incorrect permission settings. I don't understand why it writes to both the root folder and the cgi-bin folder. After an hour of tweaking I have it running, however, once it is the index=0 mode, it can't get back to the home page. Entering 'http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/blog.r' always returns to the index page for some inexplicable reason.

I still have a few days of holidays left, so I plan to pursue REBOL some more, but I have reservations about it ever being adopted to any extent by the Mac programming community at least in its current form. Perhaps an GUI/IDE would help, where code can be written and run in an editable environment. Yes I know there is the Terminal, but Mac programmers don't like it or use it. If they did they would be programming UNIX or some other terminal language.

I think Carl should give serious thought about R3's approachability, certainly on the Mac at any rate. I mean, the nuts and bolts are missing. Nobody seems to know how big a 'string' can be? I might assume 2048 bytes but apparently it is about 2 gigs!

Vanilla.r looks like something I could certainly use, but without better docs I'm loath to try it after my initial blog.r experience.

I hope I can get a handle on this and drink from the REBOL well, but perhaps I'm too old a dog to learn new REBOL tricks.

ChrisD

[PeterWood]

Chris

Quite a number of the most active Rebol programmers are Mac users. Some such as Olivier Auverlot, the author of three French books on Rebol, used Rebol extensively on  pre-OS X Macs. In the long term I'm confident that this will result in a Mac quality Rebol with a Cocoa interface. Obviously, it won't be available the minute Rebol 3 is released.

Until then I'll continue using Rebol/Core for non-Gui and cgi programming on my ageing iBook running OS X 10.2.8

So I'd encourage you to get to know Rebol in anticipation of Rebol 3 and the promise it holds.

Peter

[old_mac]

Thanks Peter

It is nice to know that there are other Mac users of REBOL. I guess my problem is coming to grips with console something that the Mac does a good job shielding me from.

I'm awaiting R3 with great anticipation...

ChrisD

[henrikmk]

I'm awaiting R3 with great anticipation...

There will be a very clear problem with R3, which might as well be brought to light: The amount of core developers working on REBOL is very small and there will be need for a lot of volunteers to port to various platforms. Mac is no exception, as the current port of R2 is only half done. I believe that the primary platforms (Mac, Windows and possibly Linux) will be handled by Rebol Technologies themselves, but others will have to come forward in order to provide ports to their favourite platforms.

How this will be handled has not really been debated yet, but I'm personally hoping that people who point out missing parts of R3 will be willing to contribute fixes to those problems themselves.

We are by no means a large community and don't have seemingly infinite libraries of tools, IDEs and helper software like PHP or Python do. There is however a lot of high spirit and a lot of talented people, who just happen to have their hands completely full right now.

[old_mac]

I have no problems contributing within my capabilities on the Mac.

It is sort of a chicken or egg situation. It would be great if more people would use REBOL, but people tend to gravitate to where the tools (IDE and libraries) are.

To this end I have just posted instructions for using Vanilla 0.6.2 on the Mac using MAMP, a very popular LAMP installation. The MacOSX instructions on the Vanilla website are simply incorrect or old. (see the Code examples forum here).

Having been a Mac user since 1982 (Lisa). I have watch it progress over the years and finally see it realizing the popularity it deserves. So REBOL 3 has an incredible opportunity to dethrone PHP et al in the hearts and minds or our youth. But we need code examples of how to use REBOL with Javascript or AJAX or the next cool thing to come down the pipe.

Why anyone would rather write thousands of lines of convoluted PHP script in Eclipse when most things can be done with a few hundred lines of readable REBOL code in a text editor is beyond me.

Please count me in when REBOL 3 is released... time and health permitting

ChrisD