World: r3wp

Kaj - who's Karl Robillard? And who's Boron author? Carl too? I don't 
remember him from ML (but maybe my memory does not work well enough), 
I don't know him from here,so if I might choose - I will always prefer 
systems from guys like Gabriele, Doc, Ladislav, or other ppl well 
known from the community past. So - the problem in communication 
might be on both sides. Besides that, of course - many of us had 
no interest in fork projects, as R3 seemed so promissing ... who 
could knew that it will end the way it is? :-)

Pardon? What does Carl have to do with Boron?

In old times, Karl was active in the REBOL community under the handle 
Wickedsmoke, publishing REBOL code on his website and SourceForge

He was also in AltME, but he's an open source guy, so for his language 
implementations he followed all the usual open source routes, much 
like Red is doing now

you see - I even don't know, who's the Boron's author ...

And you deny that REBOL people are ignoring him?

Conversely, the open source scene is ignoring REBOL, and sadly that 
includes clones, so Karl fell between a rock and a hard place

No, I deny his work with the community, that is all. Imight set-up 
REBOL conference, and invite no-one, just do some infrastructure, 
web-presentation, etc., not talk to ppl, and wonder, why noone is 
attending ... I never felt enough "marketing" is surrounding Orca 
or Boron.


And yes, open-source world is ignoring REBOL clones, maybe because 
1) they think that there is very few ppl involved anyway 2) because 
they might feel that anything REBOL related is doomed, not enough 
popular, etc. 3) because REBOL syntax and functional languages do 
not attract many, and they hardly become mainstream ... 4) because 
world is moving towards - do-everything-in-JS+HTML+CSS

Ah, so why does the open source world think nothing is going on with 
REBOL? Because we organised a conference without inviting them

It's true that Karl is not very proactive, but you have to ask yourself 
who the needy one is here. Open source has all they want, Karl has 
his own language he wanted; the REBOL community is the needy one 
without a language

I don't compare him to R3, I am comparing him to Doc, and his aproach. 
And I can see the difference (for myself, of course). And RED is 
open-source language too ... Anyway - I abandoned R3.I am waiting 
for Carl to announce R4 :-)

What other project is Carl involved in?

SFaber, I think that learning REBOL cannot hurt. For me it still 
will be very good universal tool.

Carl is involved in some secret projects, that's why it's such a 
mystery:)

I can accept that.  I've been looking at python and perl and cannot 
even choose a gui to work with.

I like python best, but there is no gui for v.3.0.

SFarber, it depends on what your goal is. If you want to have some 
plain fun with programming and create some handy tools, or go into 
discovery on how deep REBOL is, then REBOL is fine, even if R3 is 
not visibly moving right now. If you want to compare its momentum 
to, say, Python or Ruby, and look at the suite of libraries for them, 
then REBOL clearly loses out, because it is not as widespread.

Typically, there are not many libraries available as most choose 
to use REBOL very vertically in their hobby or business, including 
both of those I'm involved in.

What do you use REBOL for?

Almost anything in my pipeline: Text editing, compiling, building, 
writing docs, compiling docs, deployment, support and website.

What kind of "compiling" do you use REBOL for?

Compilation of dialects from other dialects or generating code. Not 
really anything specific, but whatever happens to be suitable for 
the current project.

Are you talking about using REBOL as a scripting language?

I realize this is a strange response, but there are many things that 
one would do in REBOL that would probably be a terrible idea in other 
languages.

I used REBOL to build Machinarium game for iPad2 which should be 
released this week:) And I can swear that without REBOL it would 
not be possible although this version is coded in ActionScript 3.

OK.  My interest is in a gui and a database.

And I'm looking forward to play a little bit with the new Adobe AIR3.0 
SDK - http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/class-summary.html

Which does not mean I will leave REBOL.

Sfarber, ok, that should be possible.

OK, everybody who knows rebol loves it.

I've been using it for a decade now. The big problem with it is that 
anything else becomes painful to work with. :-)

I guess I'm just going to have to learn rebol regardless of anything 
else I learn.

Outside of rebol, what is the best free gui toolkit?

Hard to say... I'm not gui person, if I don't count Flash.. maybe 
other knows.

Henrik, Oldes, thanks for your time.

From time to time I watch http://haxe.org/doc

Pekr: "...author's ignorance to co-work with the community..." - 
this time you are wrong. It is your ignorance, Pekr.

The big problem with it is that anything else becomes painful to 
work with.


That is so true. Once you realize, how easy development can be, it's 
a pain to work with just about any other language. The difference 
is like when humans moved from carving letters into stone to using 
a printing press a la Gutenberg.


If you're forced to use other languages, it's maybe not a good idea 
to learn REBOL!? :) Jokes aside, learning REBOL was the largest change 
for me in my programming career.

SFarber, regarding gui toolkits, maybe Qt is worth a look. Was created 
by norwegian Trolltech and acquired by Nokia:
http://qt.nokia.com/products/

I remember, it looked promising, when it came out. I don't know, 
if it still holds.

Qt is very popular, but it is written in C++, which from our perspective 
means that it is much harder to write bindings to other languages 
for than for toolkits written in C

Isn't it possible to make a C wrapper for Qt? Maybe it is done already?

Yes, but that's the thing: before you can write a binding to your 
language, you must write a binding to C in C++. So it's double work 
and you must be fluent in C++ as well

I'm not sure, but I don't think the bindings are usually written 
with that one intermediate level in C. They're usually meshes of 
C++ and the target language in some tool such as SWIG

And as always, writing it once is not enough. You also have to maintain 
it when Qt changes

Too bad. :/

Maybe it is possible in an easy way, as I read this on the wiki:

Qt can also be used in several other programming languages via language 
bindings.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28framework%29

Sure, that's after the hard work is done

If you evaluate toolkits, you'll see a sharp distinction in available 
bindings between C and C++ subsystems, and in how current the bindings 
are

Ladislav - I don't mind you thinking I am wrong, as I might be easily 
misunderstood. This time though, I insist. You either know what has 
to be done to support your effort, or you don't, which is often the 
case of good engineers ...

I wonder what happens with Qt. Is that open-sourced? Because there 
is no place for Qt at Nokia now, after they became MS HW house?

And Intel seems to be closing MeeGo down too :-( Meego, as a mobile 
OS, was not tied to JAVA, like Android is. You could run Python, 
PHP - it would be probably a good target for R3 without much effort 
...