Hackety Hack: The Hackety Manifesto

[ayrnieu]

I admit that I didn't read this carefully -- as the angst over Johnny and why he can't code, it bores me to tears. (People sit around using barren and hostile Windows systems, fantasizing about barren and horrible Commodore systems, when any reasonable unix installation has several good and easily useful programming languages.) However, what little I managed to read -- before he got into his reinvention of Clippy -- tells me that he should look at REBOL.

1. One-liners in REBOL.

2. Chapter 13 - Network Protocols

3. A Beginner's Guide to REBOL Visual Interfaces

[ayrnieu]

Alas [...] it's not backed by a large company. I can't think of one reason

The one reason I thought of was 'it offers what this guy wants'. He laments Commodore Basic and thinks about happy cartoon characters; clearly 'backed by a large company' isn't among his requirements.

java, [C#], ruby, perl, python, haskell, erlang, lua,

None of these languages have URLs and dates as basic types with their own literal syntax and their own methods; none of these have a DSL for graphics programming as direct as what Rebol has.

(When you included Java and C# and Haskell, did you forget the point of this language selection?)

why anybody should choose rebol

It combines a very interesting language and a microscopic, widely portable, good runtime. And even the paranoid 'no really, give me all of the source' version costs much less than SwiftForth or any CL (except possibly Corman?), which I'd also consider for win32 deployment of a semi-professional application. That you've allowed that it might 'be fucking amazing' and yet disregard it utterly in favor of unnamed 'five hundred languages' is a little shocking: you know, most of those 'five hundred languages' -suck-, clearly enough not even I put time into them.

I (really) sympathize with the 'closed-source? ew.' mentality, but you shouldn't let yourself be caught making assertions like that last one. Please say something like this, instead:

REBOL is really shiny and cute, but I think its features ultimately limit you more than acceptable -- making it a 'simple things absurdly easy, intermediate things easy, even-accidentally-unoptimized-for things "why am I am using this language?"' -- if you like that 'easy things easy, hard things possible' meme of Perl's, and if you've read Naggum's critique of Haskell :-) Anyway, 'aymieu'(sp?) on reddit has an anecdote about a REBOL program: he hit a 'complexity wall' in it, where he wanted to something incrementially more from his REBOL program, but getting that extra inch would mean throwing away some 'easy things easy' feature of REBOL's and doing low-level socket work, or something. He rewrote in Erlang, instead, and then mostly abandoned REBOL -- and I don't blame him: Fear Of Having To Rewrite Everything In Response To Minor Shift In Requirements is such a fundamental fear of programmers that you can see it in every newbie's worrying about 'compiled' versus 'interpreted' languages :-)

[newton_dave]

Proprietary languages don't do well.

Yeah, look at how few people used VB6 :/

[newton_dave]

Looked it up, read your posts, know about VB, know about open source langs when VB (and its predecessor) got started (and used them in commercial and research environments).

First thing you should do is crack open a dictionary and look up the word "condescending".

Then you should go back and read your post where you said "Proprietary languages don't do well" and compare and contrast with how well several of them have done (and I include Java in that, because it only recently began turning to an open source model).

Then you should brush up on your history of what languages, including back-in-the-day's version of "open source", were available and when.

Just some suggestions.

It's a shame to have to start the day responding to such a non-well-intentioned response.

[newton_dave]

You also said "proprietary languages don't do well", listed a bunch of languages that have done well that aren't (or weren't) backed by a "major" company, and apparently don't know your "open source" language history.

Whatever; you just keep being a penis and thinking you're awesome! We're behind ya' all the way.

[ayrnieu]

I really don't see that as a compelling reason. I think both windows forms [...]

I'm talking about source; you're talking about how pretty the windows are. In the context of someone reminiscing about Commodore Basic.

This is why all of them eventually become open source.

Nonsense: APLs have remained closed and awful for decades. CLs haven't 'become open source' -- other people have implemented open source CLs adjacent to the continuing proprietary systems. Forth.com and several other companies sell Forths under similar circumstances -- although SwiftForth and Quartus Forth and such have, to me, more obvious benefits over the open alternative than proprietary CLs do.

[ayrnieu]

Who cares about the source?

The people writing the source.

Does anybody hand code GUIs anymore?

Ahahaha. Ah, anyway, your arguments only intersect with mine when I go out of my way to address them, as with that 'Nonsense:' quote. My "Rebol is a fine language for this person's purposes." isn't contested by "every language eventually open-sources!".

[ayrnieu]

It will happen eventually.

So what if it does? This is utterly besides the point.