World: r3wp

To me it appears as if (and BrianH has stated this too), that the 
REBOL browser has presented Carl with a range of low-level issues 
that need to be fixed before he can move on. He's attacking the issues 
at both high and low level, by exposing R3 to real-world application 
development and seeing where R3 falls through. Some new functions 
in R3 are indeed made because of requirements from real-world R3 
standard libraries like VID3, such as DELECT.

He probably views it as much more expensive to correct R3 afterwards, 
and I think VID3.4 has profound changes in R3 just like Unicode had, 
so it's very important to get that right.

Yup

It was the lack of easy acess to S3 that caused me to finally bail 
from Rebol.  And it's still getting discussed..in PHP you can drop 
in a S3 class and be up and running in 5 minutes.

Face it, a language with no community is no language. And by community, 
I mean > 10000 daily users.

The shame is, Rebol is a great language.  Personally, I blame the 
license... the world changed, and failing to change with it is obscurity 
doom.

It's much more than the license, but RT is not unwilling to change. 
Apart from the core license, R3 fixes all other uptake issues. It's 
just unfortunate that it came to be a package deal that's hard to 
finish

Maarten is working on S3 support.

As he said above.

Face it, a language with no community is no language

 I wouldn't judge REBOL's adoption rate purely by the number of people 
 who regularly post in this world. I receive a lot of email from folks 
 using stuff I've written in their day-to-day jobs and they don't 
 post here or to the mail list ... I've even spoken to a few startups 
 who are going into business primarily on the strength of REBOL and 
 "time to market". Whether a "killer app" will ever be REBOL-based 
 is the big question ...

I don't think we need x number of users to validate our own choices 
in using Rebol.

I'm not using REBOL based on its number of users. Never was.

I think Carl will find other things to do in life if interest falls 
below a certain level.

i don't think so ...

carl does rebol more for fun than for profits and since he gets fun 
and new ideas he want to build in rebol  there is no way rebol dies 
...

do amiga PCs stopped interresting people the day the company closed 
?

not at all you still now in day have fan of it that tweak it for 
educational purpose or research

and rebol is intemporal like all languages. But yes we can say it's 
unknown and that's in my opinion a pitty.

What solutions we have to make rebol better known ? hum .... vast 
question and many ways to answer it

better known means more visibility more people claiming they use 
rebol because it's the best and nothing else ...

but quite franckly for the end user what ever the language is until 
the software he use feets his needs ...

now you have several scripting languages and most of them are a "success" 
 because of their easy interoperability like lau or VB script...

or python

and some other are succes because of their specialisation like PHP 
 wich outside a web server can't exist

and some other because simply you don't have accès to the source 
code like java (yes I know ....)

but the least we can say it that Carl is not so wrong in his vision 
because the need to extrapolate the hardware and the software is 
a more and more a need in software making industry those20 past years 
you get a lot of  scripting languages created

With out the community we have here I would not get too far with 
REBOL. Most of the apps I try to make can not be done out of the 
box without a lot of expertise and code add-ons that I get from you 
guys. For a novice reboler the community is essential...there really 
is no other source.

REBOL won't die. Consider that a statement.

Hear hear!   hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and 
eloquent speaker has to say!

Carl is making very good progress on the new VID system .. expect 
a new blog very soon.

It's going to be a much more scaleable vector driven system

There was a large amount of work spent on simplification. More than 
originally anticipated.

I'm all for simplification as it increases the number of potential 
users

The world has moved on. The browser is THE client, everything is 
moving into the cloud, and will continue to do so, and apps need 
to be mobile (read work on iPhone).

Terry, I'm still convinced that the whole "the browser is the client" 
thing will implode. It's just the wrong concept. You just have to 
many parts, protocols, plug-ins, versions, etc. involved to get it 
ever secure and reliable.

I think the only reason it won't implode is the size of the user 
base.. millions, if not billions, are spent working around any issues. 
It will evolve.

I picked up a 3G to replace my 1st gen iphone today..  screw Rebol.. 
give me Cocoa.

And I don't even own a Mac.

Terry - then explain me, why everybody tries to move away from browser 
with their RIA? Flash/Flex, Silverlight, etc.?

Screw REBOL, give me Cocoa ... nice ... so where is my Cocoa for 
Windows? :-)

The mobile market is even more crowded. WinMobile 6.1, Symbian, iPhone 
(OS-X ?), Android, OpenMoko (various linux mini OS variants)

I don't think they're tyring to move away from the browser so much 
as trying to bring the desktop towards the browser... probably just 
because they can.. and I don't believe those technologies will get 
much traction.. especially compared to the browser.

You are the second one who said "because they can" ... interesting 
:-)

My question is this.. "What is the end game?" Is everything going 
to be a little RIA? I doubt it. A clunky browser? Probably not.

Where wil it be in 10, 25, 100 years?

Do you know the answer?

I said it xy years ago, that it will happen. Nowadays browser is 
considered being "universal app container" ... the strange thing 
is, that while it provides crap speed (even with AJAX) compared to 
native apps, ppl are forgivable here. But - in order for browser 
to keep its chances, we need to keep the standards. Looking at W3C 
and all its MLs, I wonder how cross platform, cross browser support 
goes. There are technologies for multimedia like SMIL, etc., SVG 
- crappy supported.

Some things are timeless.  
- Everything is data. 

- Software is a solution to a problem, or some form of entertainment.

And now we can see Google trying to keep their own agenda - moving 
ppl to Gears ... which has nothing in common with standards - it 
is linking ppl to use their services .... and off-line app support? 
There are some first tries, but that is it - just only tries - no 
standard for off-line apps. We recently collapsed our CRM system, 
because thinking that today's world is fully on-line, is wishfull 
thinking. So we are developing off-line plus sync ...

Storage was once an huge issue.. not anymore. 
internet transfer rate was once a huge issue.. not anymore.
Always on connectivity will fall as well.

Personally, I think it boils down to 'solutions' rather than technologies. 
My wife couldn't care less how the photos get from here to Australia.

To much emphasis here is spent of technology .. and very little on 
solutions... like S3 support, API mashups blah blah blah.

The greatest killer app the world has ever seen could very well be 
built using Rebol, which would generate a massive following overnight. 
However, the killer app itself will be about an idea.. not something 
special Rebol offers, or any other language for that matter. When 
it boils down, all languages are pretty much the same. It becomes 
a religious thing and a preference.  There's a strong tendency in 
this biz for developers to stick with what they know, even if the 
alternative is 'better' (whatever that means)