World: r3wp

This is why Carl's work lately has been worth waiting for. I mean, 
if it was just a GUI framework that would be silly, right? :)

The idea of the REBOL browser is to replace the Viewtop paradigm 
with a webbrowser paradigm, because people will relate to that much 
more. You have a standard browser-like window. You enter a URL and 
get a "page" or a script run from that location displayed in the 
window. I mentioned earlier that I felt Carl was trying to restart 
webbrowsing. Carl's situation right now is probably right where Tim 
Berners-Lee was back in the early 90's as he was finishing Mosaic 
1.0. Carl will just be starting in 2008 with 2012-type web technologies, 
rather than 1994.

I fear our expectations are maybe too high. Not sure we could create 
anything revolutionary here?

starting from scratch is pretty revolutionary in itself, but I haven't 
seen the browser yet, so I can't say for sure that it will be exactly 
like I imagined.

Our expectations for what we will get out of this are probably not 
too high. Our hopes for getting this adopted by others, that may 
be another matter. It's one thing to build it, another to get people 
to use it.

if it will be like I imagined, it's going to be one heck of a tech 
demo.

But we can already do one: Just 'do a complex VID script in the R2 
console, such as Devbase and see how fast it loads. Now do the same 
thing in AJAX.

Not that wide adoption and vindication wouldn't be nice... :)

I think for wide adoption the browser window needs to fit inside 
an ordinary browser window as well. If it works somewhat the same 
way as the native rebol browser (lacking certain rebol browser features), 
you have a pretty good demo of what it would be.

for wide adoption the browser window
 => "for wide adoption the REBOL browser window"

needs to fit -> needs to be able to fit when necessary

Take that with a grain of salt though - I use REBOL for server-side 
stuff most of the time.

well, sure, but I imagine there would be a degree of control of how 
you want it to layout, either in a GUI oriented fashion or a document 
oriented fashion.

AltME, DevBase and non-graphical batch scripts being the exceptions 
to server-side use, of course.

If the Rebol browser window does not fit in the browser window then 
adoption will be slow.  But there is some hope if we can do what 
the web does today (or better) in one language... that's golden and 
should increase the adoption rate.  I hope I will be able to get 
it in my work-place, that would make my decade.

Have you looked at Chrome? Even browser apps are trying to get out 
of the browser window :)

yes, they are trying, but first they become famous because of browser 
....

Yup. There is a lot to learn there, and the number one lesson is 
this: they did it with what was there already, no plugins. If we 
want REBOL in web browsers, we are going to have to look somewhere 
other than Google for inspiration. Still, some of their recent behavior 
has some clues. Look at Gears - they are clearly recognizing that 
networks aren't reliable or fast enough to count on consistency. 
That's why they are promoting local storage.

Perhaps it's the language

How do languages like Erlang cope with unreliable networks?

How so?

(sorry, question delayed by AltME)

Isn't Erlang designed with network failures assumed?

In general, languages like Erlang handle unreliable networks with 
redundancy, and it can do that because it is a functional language 
with no assignment. The state needed to answer a question is passed 
with the question. That way you can ask the same question multiple 
times and get the same answer every time.

Still, Erlang's advantages are more from the OTP system than the 
Erlang language, though the no-assignment language with lightweight 
process concurrency and message passing makes it easier to implement 
something like OTP.

REBOL's statefulness and heavyweight processes make this kind of 
redundancy more difficult, but it can be done.

I recall Maarten was going to port an Erlang database to Rebol ...

this database was distributed across the network or something ... 
don't recall all the details

Since he hasn't done it ... I guess these things are more difficult

They are, but to be fair he may be busy.

there are so many people now working on qtask .. it should be finished 
by now!

Qtask is never going to be finished ... it is imo turning into ratgher 
complex product ...

Maarten's stack was based upon Chord implementation. But he mentioned 
even more interesting stuff. IIRC, he also said it is already running, 
and once proven, he will release it.

Google is never going to be finished - it is turning into a rather 
complex product. No, it is a company or a platform, not a product.

Which ties up all the Rebol talent into one big hole

Qtask could probably stand to adopt Google's 20% time. I'll ask them.

20% time?

qtask is Rebol's Hadron collider

All google employees are asked to work on a personal project 20% 
of the time they work there. That means 1 day a week.

Interesting .. and who owns the IP?

Qtask is also the largest scale project REBOL has. There is a good 
bet that PITL innovations will be coming to REBOL from Qtask.

information does not escape from a black hole except as hawking radiation

I don't know who owns the IP, but it seems that many current Google 
projects stem from such 20% projects

I've seen nothing come out of qtask of benefit to the larger community

That may be the case with black holes, but not necessarily the case 
with Qtask. Insight from work on Qtask informs the people who are 
working on implementing REBOL. Plus, the long term goal is to open 
source Qtask itself (or so I've heard).

Nonetheless, we should be having this discussion in the !Qtask group.

Maarten has some good stuff done, but hasn't released it yet, as 
it's not *quite* complete.


Erlang/OTP is heavy on supervision trees, so things get retried if 
they fail.

Graham, sometimes you don't want to see, and sometimes you don't 
want to wait.

I am finishing S3 as we speak (this week) and I hope we'll release 
it to the community as open source. Done right though - visible in 
the right places etc.

Could be.