World: r3wp

Exactly

I can understand your situation and it's an unfortunate thing. The 
only thing I can say that might help, is that there have been suggestions 
about a plan to extend the alpha to the users in this world, so experienced 
REBOLers can take a look at it and "kick the tires", so to speak.


The problem with doing that is that it creates talk. Lots of talk. 
"why is this there? why does this function do that? I don't like 
this!" We have had a TON of discussions over the design of VID3 on 
how to do this and that, and we're not done with that yet. It's very 
time consuming to do that, when one man (Gabriele) wants to sit quietly 
and work out the design on his own until it's ready. It's just faster 
that way in the long run. Every time a new guy comes in, 500 questions 
need to be answered and it's usually the same 500 questions as the 
last new guy. :-)


Ideally, no questions should be asked until after about a week of 
use and start testing it right away. If there is a problem or a bug, 
consult the bug tracker or the documentation database, look at the 
discussions and the design documents and keep out of particularly 
Carl's, Gabriele's and Cyphre's hair until they crawl out from their 
holes on their own.

Again, these demons were called up by the very people who wanted 
to avoid them

I'm in a big project myself, and there's no way you can ignore these 
issues. You have to deal with them as best you can. The world isn't 
perfect, and neither will R3 ever be

Nor its development process

RT is making it impossible to plan REBOL development. And if you 
can't plan it, you can't use it

I use R2 in all my products. Sure you can use it. I have no plan 
to move to R3 until a good time after R3.0 is done, perhaps for R3.1.

R2 is unusable in most of my designs. It might as well not exist 
for them

Well, then you will have to use something else. I also have products 
in the pipeline that are impossible to do in R2. They will be done 
in R3 in about a year.

So we just have to increase all given estimates by a year or so?

let's say 5 years, just to be sure.

You do realise this is placing REBOL outside any real market?

probably only the market that expects R3 to be done next week.

You can try to make a joke out of it, but I'm not amused

But I can already see now that the given dates should not have been 
released at all, since people react strongly to it. Let's make it 
10 years.

You're not amused, because you made a plan around what Carl said 
(and again, I think he really shouldn't have said). I agree it's 
not funny, and it may put your reputation on the line, but use it 
as an experience in when to plan around an alpha product the next 
time, no matter what the manufacturer says.

This is not the point. I deal with shifting schedules every day, 
and if necessary, I produce running estimates as best I can. I just 
want RT to start doing the same

All my scheduling is worthless if it includes an RT component, and 
I will be blamed for false promises made by RT

don't include it then.

You really want me to conclude that RT is placing REBOL outside a 
real market?

go ahead. I have to go back to work. :-)

Look. This place is meant to take the burden off of RT development, 
as you said above. You can either choose to relay the feelings of 
the market place to RT, or choose to ignore it

Since we're still in the alpha state, it'll probably be ignored. 
RT has no time to talk about R3 right now, so as a countermeasure, 
I and a few others do that.

Yes, and as I said, you should not be the one to field this criticism, 
but my intention is that my deep concerns are relayed to RT

the only way to win you over would be to invite you behind the curtains 
to see R3 :-) but you'd probably have to contribute to it.

I don't believe nothing can be done about this. As I suggested on 
Carl's blog, a decent stepwise release plan would already help a 
lot

I already offered Gabriele to contribute

I was won over some six years ago. My issue is with planning, and 
not just for myself, but everyone who needs to be able to plan REBOL 
projects

I guess I'm more "fortunate". All my projects are R2 only and there 
is probably 2-3 years of work left if I would have the time and money 
to pursue them all. For me there are many things left to do with 
R2 that will be useful for R3 later, such as native Windows printing.

I can take a more relaxed view and pick whatever I want for my first 
R3 project.

For me, I have been rescheduling to other things for a long time. 
If I can't start working on R3, it makes most sense to work on non-REBOL 
projects

I've become a Ruby programmer over the past five years, for example, 
while I wanted to be a REBOL programmer

out of curiosity, what do you think of it?

(Ruby)

It's good, but not inspiring such as REBOL. Code-wise, it leads to 
very similar results, but usually not as elegant (although there 
are a few exceptions). But it lacks all the data capabilities

It's supposed to be the OO language, but I actually avoid OO in it 
because it's class-based

And no graphical interfaces, of course, because that would make you 
use some half cross-platform C/C++ toolkit with huge bindings

So I've been standing outside in the snow for five years with my 
command-line programs, looking through the window at the people eating 
rich roasts before the fire place...

Please don't say I'm not patient...

:-)

wait, 1st august was not "beta", it was "getting the alpha to a wider 
audience". it has been suggested that it would have been bad to do 
so, so in the end it wasn't done. the dates were not unrealisting, 
they were based on the idea of releasing "early". that idea was later 
on opposed and so it wasn't done. also, the august date was based 
on the fact that me and cyphre had to be away from r3 development 
for august and september, and so we thought it was better to release 
rather than delay two months.

That's what it turned into. Originally it was promised as beta

An early alpha followed by a beta a month later was promised.

It was fine with me if it had been an alpha release, but it's several 
months later and we have nothing

But from waiting for Rebol releases before I knew that it simply 
wasn't going to happen.

Carl just doesn't understand the damage he does to the community 
with these totally unrealistic announcements

Yeah, I adjusted too, but there is no adjusting to this, because 
there is still nothing and no meaningful date

Yes, that's also my impression. I want it to change for the future

I don't think it's possible to change Carl without someone managing 
him.

Right, but he's the boss. He has to take responsibility