World: r3wp

Also even though Forth and Smalltalk are dinamic languages they don't 
have CFG. So the problems is not dynamicity.

Pekr, I guess my reaction was due to this comment "Good old Jaime 
adheres to hype :-)", this is simply  not true. I recommended Rails 
because I liked the productivity boost that I got in a recent project, 
not because of its popularity.  I  have read about different Programming 
Languages and found that  each one  has its strengths and its weaknesses. 
But independent of this you can always learn a new technique that 
will expand your horizons..

Can we build a rebol framework similar to rails?

is there any point?

Yes. We can but it requires a lot of work, and then your second questions 
makes you wonder.

What is it about Rails that makes Ruby a good fit?

We are building Quilt on Rebol, and it seems to be going very well. 
 But we have nothing to compare to.

BTW, such framework is being built, and it is called Quilt. The backend 
engine behind QTask. I can wait to get my hands on it.

Rails uses a lot of OO messaging smalltak style. Which ruby allows 
natively, so I think this lowers the impedance match. Such dialect 
can be constructed in Rebol. But does it means that is the best approach?

Jaime - ok, I correct myself - to what you said by "rebol sending 
me to loopholes" and calling it a productivity issue, from that point 
you are probably more than right ...

by my comment regarding "hype", I really mean something ppl should 
be carefull about - that most ppl I meet, even in corporate environment, 
talk about hypes. And maybe "hype" is not the correct word, maybe 
it is about "trends"? They even don't know what ajax is in particular, 
yet they tell their boss, they will use new tool for their job - 
ajax, and their boss said - hmm, I read something about it - it has 
to be cool and we will support it ;-)

in fact, I am one of two "right hands" (it is a saying in czech language) 
for our CTO. And the reason is, that I provide him with opinions 
not tied to any products of my liking. Our Delhi group, would do 
everything in Delphi, our Lotus Notes group, would do everything 
in Lotus Notes, the same goes for VB and SAP folks, and of course, 
jokingly, I would do everything in Rebol. But - things need some 
level of understanding of current/historical situation in the company.

that said - last time my rebol friend Bobik, who did nice apps in 
Rebol already, needed suggestion regarding the project in the company 
he works for, it was me, who suggested him not to use rebol, but 
go with php, apache, and it was becaue it was much better fit for 
their company in their situation. And if someone will ask about fast 
web development, I have already one friend I suggested him to look 
into Ruby on Rails ....

... and it is imo the same reason and experience, why I suggested 
you to look into Mikrotik routerOS some time ago, and would be probably 
valid, if you would not have coded your own system ....

Reichart - what is Quilt? Something related to Qtask?

Graham - actually I thought about "porting" Rails to rebol and calling 
it "rebol on trails" :-) But last time looking at rails api, it is 
already large jog done. OTOH we would only clone API that already 
exists ... dunno ....  because whole web 2.0 mess is here, to be 
finally able to do what REBOL/View can do, just using browser ...

maybe a 'bridge' for REBOL-Ruby.


allowing Ruby to call or access REBOL 'objects' directly and vice 
versa.

Now we know Flash and Ruby try to go outside the browser, so I wonder 
how usefull Rails will be in such a territory. I still think, that 
IOS like "platform" for app delivery, is still unmatched. Dunno what 
Altissimo is supposed to mean, but having rebol services or uniserve/beer 
whatever based framework for app distribution, like it was planned 
with Morpheus or even Altme, would be a win ....

Volker compilation of rebol is due to context free grammars. If you 
take this restriction you could probably have a bootstrap of rebol. 
But you can not compile just any rebol program. So this is a problem.

We are talking about bootstrapping. There is no need to compile every 
program. Its only needed to have a subset to build the interpreter. 
And that one must be able to generate machine-code.

Thats what forth does with meta-compilers and squeak does with slang. 
Ugly, so a pretty good motive to do most in meazzines :)

Geomol, you've got competition - inspired by DeluxePaint, Lunapaint 
is new painting program done from scratch, or so is my understanding 
- http://sub-ether.org/lunapaint/

hmm, but maybe I already posted it in the past :-)

http://www.easy2remember.name/media/51/Spore-game-video.html<--- 
for gamers, this looks mightily impressive. An evolution game with 
a 100% dynamic world.

actually not just a world but an entire universe

For inspiration, Wright looked to the 

demo scene," a group of (mostly European) coders who specialized 
in doing a whole lot with a little bit of code. Their procedural 
programming methods were able to, for example, fit an entire 3D game 
in 64K, using mathematics to generate textures and music, etc. "I 
just found this incredibly exciting," Wright confesses, describing 
the kinds of work that he saw come out of the demo scene."


So here's what he did: he recruited an elite strike team of coders 
(who, if you were to believe his slideshow, dressed like ninjas) 
and put them in a 

hidden facility" to experiment with new ways of giving the user powerful 
tools and generating tons of dynamic content without armies of content 
creators. Best of all, he fired up a demo and showed his audience 
the results... "

this is almost a REBOL like way to create games :-)

Volker you are right. But I was thinking on Rebol bootstrapping itself 
and offering incremental compilation too. Just like Dylan or CL. 
Here is an excerpt from wikipedia. "Common Lisp has been designed 
to be implemented by incremental compilers. Standard declarations 
to optimize compilation (such as function inlining) are proposed 
in the language specification. Most Common Lisp implementations compile 
functions to native machine code. Others compile to bytecode, which 
reduces speed but eases binary-code portability. The misconception 
that Lisp is a purely-interpreted language is most likely due to 
the fact that Common Lisp environments provide an interactive prompt 
and that functions are compiled one-by-one, in an incremental way."

Unfortunately this is not easily accomplish with rebol, unless you 
throw away the CFG and with this you loss dialecting flexibility.

I thought about that a bit. IMHO it is not that impossible. But may 
need new core-features.
The idea is that argument-lists rarely change.

Rebol lets us inspect the last values a function used. So from the 
source i cant be sure 'append is really that global 'append. But 
after the function has run, i can look what the last append was, 
and see that it got two arguments. And then i can "insert parens" 
and process it like lisp.

Needs a profile-run, or would work really well with a jit. And the 
interpreter needs to stay in the background for very hart blocks.

Jaime - from my limited understanding - you would like to see rebol 
kind of grammar to be defined and used as a wrapper running upon 
another environment?

If so - would it be easier with other functional languages, or even 
possible (if such grammar would exist), in languages like Java?

Henrik - imo with more media friendly features and rebol overal extensibility 
(as was promissed earlier for rebol), we could see Rebol being a 
tool for some nice demos ....

You haven't seen Web 2.0 till you've seen the latest Framewerks.

Semantics is key.. just ask Sir Tim Berners-Lee

How about this, a single piece of code to handle any web form.. just 
add a new field to the html and you're all set... don't need to alter 
the DB or the serverside processing.

Let's see rails do that.

hear hear  for semantics!  love how REBOL is already half there with 
the lit-word - word - value.  it all ends up being triples anyway.

and TBL, although I think he's lost himself somewhere about 60,000 
feet

MY EYES ARE BLEEDING

3Tera's AppLogic - http://www.3tera.com/applogic.html

cool.  mine are burnt from all the white.

Terry, Rails already do that. It is called Migrations, a kind of 
versioned schema, and yes you just add a field and everything works.

Volker, compiling Rebol is not impossible, it is just very difficult 
exponentially difficult because " the order evaluation" for the a 
function call can change at any time. Depending on how the words 
in the body are defined. This is the CFG feature and problem.

>> test: func[][foo bar]
>> f1: func[][probe "foo first"]
>> f2: func[x][probe "foo first"]
>> bar: func[][probe "bar second"]
>> foo: :f1
>> test
foo first

bar second

>> foo: :f2
>> test   ;;; Surprise order of evaluation changed
!
bar second

foo first

This gets more complex as the body of the function grows, the problem 
of compilation becomes exponential

That is currently true. But makes it sense? What if  such things 
are simply forbidden for compilable code?

Now you could use fix the body of a function maybe not allowing for 
function! values to change dynamically, but this will limit the language. 
I think the best approach for getting closer to the metal is REBCode. 
But I am not sure you can hav a Metacircular Rebol.

I dont think it limitsthe language. I never used that  as a feature. 
Well maybe setting 'print to none, but i can live with "print: func[value][]"

For sourcecode that paren-saving is an advantage. But if i enforce 
that the number of arguments stays the same all thetime, i see no 
problems.

How about generators or dialects, they depend of such feature. I 
mean dialect that don't use parse.

The problem is that you can not assume that the environment hasn't 
change, because if you assumed the you have broken the semantics.

Can you give an example?