5 ms·

I'm surprised that I haven't heard of this line of languages before. The home page of Rebol, which it says it's derived from, seems to do a much better job at

I'm surprised that I haven't heard of this line of languages before. The home page of Rebol, which it says it's derived from, seems to do a much better job at stating its purpose: http://rebol.com/ http://rebol.com/

timbit42 3y ago
The creator, Carl Sassenrath, also wrote the pre-emptive multi-tasking Amiga OS. He was a fan of Lisp and Logo and wrote Amiga Logo after he left Commodore. Rebol is based on Logo and Lisp.
hosh 3y ago
Rebol reminds me a lot of Tcl/Tk, but I can’t tell if that is because there’s a dialect that resembles it, or that it takes inspiration from tcl’s command substitution.
- rebolek 3y ago
  Tcl's command substitution is entirely string based, Rebol loads source and everything happens with internal values. That's a big difference.
  - hosh 3y ago
    Let me see if I understand this. By loading source / internal values, do you mean that the Rebol command substitution works with the AST directly?
spindle 3y ago
One of the reasons it's not so famous is that it's had various historical struggles, including being stuck at 32-bit for a long time IIRC (I'm hazy on the details and corrections welcome). I love it though.
- vosper 3y ago
  Also they went of down a cryptocurrency path for a while, not sure where that's at but it certainly seemed like a big distraction from finishing the main thing.
- fanf2 3y ago
  REBOL remained commercial closed source for a long time when the languages it was competing with were open source.
  - rebolek 3y ago
    Rebol3 in open source and there's a very active fork https://github.com/oldes/Rebol3 https://github.com/oldes/Rebol3
    - sph 3y ago
      I have spent an entire day last week studying Rebol and was not able to find an active enough fork. The language has great ideas but by God, are they terrible at just letting their presence known, both the original product and this fork. Call it the Rebol curse, I guess. All I could find were 32-bit binaries on a couple sites compiled a decade ago, and a lot of focus on Red, which is in a weird limbo as well.
      - pbronez 3y ago
        Red seems to have similar challenges. They have their code on GitHub, but the Releases are confusing. They have 3 releases posted. The latest one is 5 years old. But the project is active. You can download from their site, but the version number isn’t obvious. From poking at the project, it looks interesting but not ready to really try out yet. https://github.com/red/red/releases https://github.com/red/red/releases
      - Luctct 3y ago
        That is probably what I hate the most about today's technology. "compiled a decade ago" Listen here, kid. Two and a half decades ago I had Windows 95 and I could browse the Web, send and receive email (or fax!), play music, play videos (or movies), play games, use instant messaging, program in multiple languages, use databases, run a mail or Web server on my desktop, read and edit documents in formats such as doc, rtf, xls, ppt, pdf, xml, desktop publishing, view and edit images including high re photos, including porn of course, make international phone calls, and a few other things. And every single Tcl/Tk script (cli or gui) I wrote two decades ago still run 100% unchanged. If you refrain from using anything just because it was "compiled a decade ago" then you are a fool. Sadly, you are not alone. Far from it.
Aerbil313 3y ago
These one liners are fascinating! Why can't we have nice things like this? http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html > 2 - Open a GUI, read web page, send it as email: view layout [u: field "user@rebol.com" h: field "http://" btn "Send" [send to-email u/text read to-url h/text alert "Sent"]]
deleted 3y ago
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timbit42 3y ago

The creator, Carl Sassenrath, also wrote the pre-emptive multi-tasking Amiga OS. He was a fan of Lisp and Logo and wrote Amiga Logo after he left Commodore. Rebol is based on Logo and Lisp.

hosh 3y ago

Rebol reminds me a lot of Tcl/Tk, but I can’t tell if that is because there’s a dialect that resembles it, or that it takes inspiration from tcl’s command substitution.

rebolek 3y ago
Tcl's command substitution is entirely string based, Rebol loads source and everything happens with internal values. That's a big difference.
- hosh 3y ago
  Let me see if I understand this. By loading source / internal values, do you mean that the Rebol command substitution works with the AST directly?

spindle 3y ago

One of the reasons it's not so famous is that it's had various historical struggles, including being stuck at 32-bit for a long time IIRC (I'm hazy on the details and corrections welcome). I love it though.

vosper 3y ago
Also they went of down a cryptocurrency path for a while, not sure where that's at but it certainly seemed like a big distraction from finishing the main thing.
fanf2 3y ago
REBOL remained commercial closed source for a long time when the languages it was competing with were open source.
- rebolek 3y ago
  Rebol3 in open source and there's a very active fork https://github.com/oldes/Rebol3 https://github.com/oldes/Rebol3
  - sph 3y ago
    I have spent an entire day last week studying Rebol and was not able to find an active enough fork. The language has great ideas but by God, are they terrible at just letting their presence known, both the original product and this fork. Call it the Rebol curse, I guess. All I could find were 32-bit binaries on a couple sites compiled a decade ago, and a lot of focus on Red, which is in a weird limbo as well.
    - pbronez 3y ago
      Red seems to have similar challenges. They have their code on GitHub, but the Releases are confusing. They have 3 releases posted. The latest one is 5 years old. But the project is active. You can download from their site, but the version number isn’t obvious. From poking at the project, it looks interesting but not ready to really try out yet. https://github.com/red/red/releases https://github.com/red/red/releases
    - Luctct 3y ago
      That is probably what I hate the most about today's technology. "compiled a decade ago" Listen here, kid. Two and a half decades ago I had Windows 95 and I could browse the Web, send and receive email (or fax!), play music, play videos (or movies), play games, use instant messaging, program in multiple languages, use databases, run a mail or Web server on my desktop, read and edit documents in formats such as doc, rtf, xls, ppt, pdf, xml, desktop publishing, view and edit images including high re photos, including porn of course, make international phone calls, and a few other things. And every single Tcl/Tk script (cli or gui) I wrote two decades ago still run 100% unchanged. If you refrain from using anything just because it was "compiled a decade ago" then you are a fool. Sadly, you are not alone. Far from it.

Aerbil313 3y ago

These one liners are fascinating! Why can't we have nice things like this? http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html > 2 - Open a GUI, read web page, send it as email: view layout [u: field "user@rebol.com" h: field "http://" btn "Send" [send to-email u/text read to-url h/text alert "Sent"]]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]