World: r3wp

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

Pekr was supposed to be the community representative to liase with 
him.

so, in the end, if Carl is quiet, people complain, if he talks, people 
complain :-)

Petr is someone else with criticism who was rolled into the group. 
But he can't be responsible

No, we just ask that any promises are backed up

Personally I think that Henrik's fears are mistaken.

I didn't know that you and Cyphre were unavailable in August and 
September, but it explains that there seems to have been very little 
tangible progress

i think it was stated clearly that the "july release" if you want 
to call it that way would not have been complete. there has been 
a delay in that it went from 15 july to basically mid august. but 
at that point, Carl has been convinced that it was not a good idea 
to release an uncomplete product. so that's what it is - saying that 
there's nothing does not help. what was supposed to be released on 
july is there already. it was just been asked not to release it because 
it is not complete.

If users here get to try alpha out and ask questions, there's no 
compunction on you to answer them.

I'm also unaware of any reversal of decision on releasing early. 
This is the problem: we are kept in the dark about what's really 
going on

The rebolweek blog that was posted of the R3 progress showed that 
things were slow

5th Sept ... new View system!

damn, already a month ago? :-)

Gabriele, you're still speaking from your own point of view. Carl 
needs to start imagining our point of view. We have nothing but broken 
promises, regardless of how much the man behind the curtain has

I remember when Rebol was first released .. now that was alpha!

no console history, no ability to copy the console

is this going to be worse than that??

no. we already have console history, so it's better than that.

Which is my point.

right, we should define when to release, depending on whether we 
have console history or not :-)

If I may offer some experience from our release-early, release-often 
Syllable project: we make semi-weekly development builds, even between 
our alpha releases every three or four months. I have been amazed 
at the download peaks we get when we announce a release, while the 
weekly builds were almost it already

is that the current alpha appears to be more adanced than the first 
alphas were when they were released ~9 years ago

People understand it very well when you say: this is an official 
release, and that is a development release