World: r3wp

:) useless guy..

Ruby is one of the cleaner languages out there, so that's telling

maybe it's a money issue?

Kaj, the Ruby language itself is pretty clean. The *implementations* 
of the language mostly suck, and there are some problems with the 
underlying semantics that made some of the implementation problems 
inevitable. The language was designed to look pretty. However, they 
are working on making the implementation better - that's why there 
are so many implementations - and there have been some efforts to 
clean up the semantics too. It's slow going though, and they are 
slowed down in their efforts by having most of the implementations 
not run on Windows very well or at all, which cuts down on the developer 
pool drastically. It is not uncommon to have projects written in 
Ruby be converted to other languages when they get useful. Java is 
a pretty common target for these conversions - this is one of the 
reasons JRuby is relatively popular.

I have friends who program in Ruby for a living, and every one of 
them has independently asked that I redo the language from scratch, 
similar to Red or REBOL.

BrianH: ur friends asked u to redo what language from scratch?

(i was using ruby for living too, just this current project let's 
me use rebol -- so far..)

Ruby. I've been asked at least 6 times, by people who didn't know 
I've been asked before, but knew about my work on REBOL. One friend 
even made sure I learned Ruby just so I could tell him about the 
semantic issues of it, and possible workarounds.

btw, im seeing windows guys switching to linux or mac because of 
ruby and it's higer and higer in demand, so the developer pool is 
expanding pretty well (which i can tell u as a core member of the 
singapore ruby brigade ;)

That happens a lot. What happens more is developers not being able 
to switch away from Windows for other reasons, and so using a different 
language instead. That is why Ruby gets used more for server/web 
stuff than for client-side stuff.

client-side as in native gui?

Yes. Most business work is still native GUI nowadays, and most programming 
is still business work.

Web programming is still a very small percentage of programming work 
(5% as of the end of last year).

Interesting. Where did you get those stats?

It was 4 months or so ago when I read them, so I don't have the link. 
I was looking at job stats at the time to see what to learn next. 
I wouldn't be surprised if the trend was to more web programming 
in the future, because a lot of developers are looking for excuses 
to use Linux on the servers, and ways to support the OSX laptops 
they do their audio stuff on, while the businesses they support are 
all running Windows on the client. I've seen a lot of consultants 
try to push web-based stuff because they hate Windows, but it doesn't 
work very well a lot of the time. Still, developer pressure is cumulative, 
so eventual change seems likely.

Was it a trustworthy source?

Yes, one of the analysis companies, and it wasn't pushing an agends 
(not hired by MS).

Most of the Ruby programmers I know have Mac laptops because they 
make electronic music on the side, and picked Ruby because of its 
OSX support. The rest run Linux on the desktop. Some do both.

If it's true, it would hardly be a reason for MS to abandon their 
desktop toolkits and push HTML5

MS is pushing HTML5 in order to convince developers to not abandon 
IE. Programmers who have to do business work have to run their stuff 
on web browsers with no HTML5 support. Despite what MS says in the 
HTML5 presentations, they aren't abandoning desktop development tools 
or Silverlight any time soon. The HTML5 guys are in a different, 
competing department, so they have no say over whether the desktop 
development tools go away. Only the developers who are outside of 
MS and use their tools have any say.

For that matter, MS's Windows 8 plans are going to depend a great 
deal on improvements to their desktop/tablet/phone development tools, 
since it will have to support 3 platforms: x86, x64 and ARM. The 
.NET tools are critical to that, the same way that LLVM is critical 
to Apple.

Kaj, why not use Rebol for uploading files to S3 ?

Also, when you interact with the AWS api, you specify which API ( 
date ) you are using.

Is there an incremental syncing tool in R3?

You'd have to write that yourself

Right. Maybe I'll find the time after my retirement

Are there even Amazon protocols for R3?

Yes. I wrote them.

Maarten's were for R2, weren't they?

Yes.

I'll probably review yours again someday, but at the moment REBOL 
doesn't look like a good place for investments

I have a copy of them .. but I was never allowed to release them 
even though they are said to be open source

And Chris turned my version into a protocol

or scheme

http://www.ross-gill.com/r/s3.html

The R2 stuff was never an option for me

And now the latest version of R3 doesn't run on Syllable, either

I did the AWS stuff for S3 using SOAP

R3

Ai, I'm not interested in the SOAP interface, either

the limitation with the R2 and R3 interface is that you can't upload 
large files

That's a showstopper, too. I need to upload CD images

As I understand it .. it is far better to upload large files to S3 
from EC2

I would reckon so. But I haven't started with EC2 yet

As this week's events show, EC2 is not a good thing to become dependent 
on, either

I don't believe either Singapore or Japan were affected :)

Traditionally Rebol file transfers were done by reading the file 
into memory first which is a pain for large files.

Having said that, I think for my R3 ftp implementation, I stream 
the file off the file system instead of reading into a variable first

Sorry, but all this spells immature, and that's no way to build products

Kaj, he's talking about DVD images when he says "large files". CD 
images are small enough.