I hadn’t really considered the idea of injecting albumist into pages that weren’t designed to use them, but now that you mention it, a single column or single row layout might be kind of nice, and it could accompany other non-discography pages on a site. Here’s an example I sketched up:

I’ve been fretting a lot about releasing the code into the wild before it’s necessarily “ready”, but maybe people will be coming up with things like GreaseMonkey scripts or interesting uses like this soon. I suggested on the LyricWiki blog that maybe it would be a good future candidate for using in their current method of showing pages for artists, such as:

http://lyricwiki.org/Legendary_Pink_Dots

And that would be nifty…

I think the concept of a closed-source, ideologically pure RIA platform conceived primarily to live outside the browser is perhaps the antithesis of where the computing world is headed. To me, the road ahead looks multi-paradigm, multi-device, poly-language, and information-dense– neither simple nor pretty. REBOL is a unique and powerful tool. I hope it doesn’t become a museum piece like the Antikythera mechanism.

Well, certainly your feelings are not uncommon (and I share the opinion on the open source bit). Beyond that, it’s just generally hard to convince someone to give almost anything “new” a chance. People are busy.

For instance I haven’t learned to type on a Dvorak keyboard. Even though I type all day, I refuse to try it without serious incentive. Every time I go to another developer’s terminal to look at something and they have to go switch the keyboard settings back to standard I roll my eyes. It’s definitely points off my evaluation of a developer if they do that sort of thing (due to the fact that it’s all pseudoscience).

I’m willing to believe REBOL would fall in the category of things that will be perpetually off your radar. But this set of articles here are an attempt to explain why I find the novelty of REBOL interesting. Then again, I don’t demand something be completely practical to think they’re worth looking at. Turing Machines sure aren’t very “useful”, but everyone who programs should become familiar with them at some point.

If you don’t like weird language & platform projects (like Erlang and Squeak and such) then you’re almost certainly not going to like REBOL either. People who feel that languages which are “Java, more or less” stay out of their way and let them achieve what they want in software will not be motivated to learn REBOL…

REBOL’s rejection of the multi-markup madness is a very good thing. I was working on a JavaScript program and trying to do CSS attributes a couple days ago, when I hit the issue that if you’re going to express something like “margin-right” you can’t use hyphens, and float is a reserved word. So to translate:

.style {float: left; margin-right: 80px; }

…this becomes in Javascript:

style = {floatCss: "left", marginRight: "80px"};

That’s to say nothing of the browser standards headache on top of that… it’s like nothing works! Web developers are basically doing a disservice by patching up their sites to work on broken browsers, they’ve allowed things like Internet Explorer to survive. Why is it so hard for people to stage revolts?

RT is not going to open source REBOL, at least not in the near future, and they are not going to sign legal documents giving legal rights away to competitors. I don’t think I would even want them to, because it doesn’t make business sense and would be a sign that they are not running their business properly. As it stands, they have been in business for eleven years. They are, however, releasing source code of their choice under open-source licenses of their choice. Those are products and legal documents you can work with. Decide for yourself if it’s worth it to you and then take it or leave it. If you insist on having code to the core, build one yourself. If you want the project to be run differently, set one up yourself. The great paradox here is that everyone thinks REBOL is special, yet everyone seems to think that Carl should change the process that created it.

ORCA is available, it works, it’s not finished, and it’s not being developed quickly at the moment. One of the reasons it’s not being developed is that it works for me. I’m happily using it to support two operating systems. When I find issues that block me, I fix them. Once I want more out of it, I’m going to do more work on it. Further, it’s written in C. The engine is complete. It has its own garbage collector, it evaluates paths. It’s great fun theorising about how it could be done differently, and if you like having such discussions, the REBOL community is a great place for you. But it would amount to writing yet another clone. There are two in C, one in Java, one in JavaScript and even a REBOL interpreter in REBOL. Personally, I would have done it in OCaml. Yet, ORCA is the only usable one, so I use it.

I knew that there was a special relationship between MS and Sun in the Java case. But I’m not a legal expert, so I do not know precisely what you can and can’t do when it comes to implementing someone’s language down to the letter. Bear in mind that people have filed lawsuits on things like “similar look and feel”.

Also, it’s important to remember that companies can be sold, and their new owners can have different ideas. Imagine–for instance–RT falling into the hands of Software Conglomerate. This conglomerate immediately sends a letter from a lawyer demanding the code that analyzes for the “REBOL []” header in source files be changed to say “ORCA []”.

That’s on day 1. Who knows what would be on day 2? Technicalities preoccupy people who haven’t gotten a solid commitment that it’s NOT going to happen.

why shouldn’t I extend a bit of trust to other people as well; particularly someone who has been a public figure for almost a quarter century, who has contributed greatly to computer science, craft and society, who has helped me in my life and career through those products, and who is even occasionally helping me personally in business matters?

Do not get me wrong, Carl seems like a great guy. If you have a specific quote or article about his disposition toward open source implementations of REBOL, then that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for. My disclaimers are not etched in stone here (nor is the rest of the article). I’m just trying to oust the correct information, as Google didn’t reveal it to me.

I’m a reasonably trusting individual, but I’ve learned it is best to get things in writing—even when dealing with people you know to be good. Until you’ve done that, everyone might not be on the same page (remember the “when you ass-u-me…” joke). We all have different ideas about what “good” or “evil” are, and even if we agree in 99% of cases the 1% might be the most relevant bit at some point in time.

So getting a clear statement of DOs and DONTs up front would be good.

I also don’t see why an open-source REBOL project would be condemned to be run by “a skeletal crew”.

Not meaning to condemn anyone’s project! It’s clear ORCA represents a lot of work and I was glad to be shown it. But do note that the main trunk of Python was updated less than two hours ago (as of when I started writing this comment):

http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/

Ruby Core, also 2 hours ago:

http://svn.ruby-lang.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/trunk/

If I’m reading correctly, the last updates to ORCA were 10 months ago:

http://trac.geekisp.com/orca/browser/trunk/orca

That’s just a data point. I poked through the code a bit and had some opinions on how I would do it differently. I’d use as many well-vetted cross-platform C++ libraries as I could. And using the boost file path library is a perfect example of what I would do instead of trying to rewrite the forward/backslash logic, etc.

If you disagree with that then you would probably disagree with other ways I would do it. But these are my opinions, and we must not mistake disagreements for misconceptions! On the subject of engineering craft, especially hand-optimized C vs C++…this article by Bjarne Stroustrup is food for thought:

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/new_learning.pdf

Bjarne’s samples are pretty much what I would have given. There are just too many opportunities for bugs when writing old-style C. Even if someone is a maverick and can strcpy with the best of them, you won’t find many people at that level to collaborate with. The code falls down at inconvenient times, and has vulnerabilities to hacking.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask a company to issue a statement with the goal of making it easier for others to compete with them, without getting anything in return.

REBOL is competing for mindshare among programmers. Right now only a small fringe “gets” REBOL or cares to try to. You may know Carl and RT staff personally, but others aren’t in that situation. They want reassurance and fallbacks, and the point I’m trying to make is that those things aren’t currently available. If they were, it could change some attitudes.

A viable and active open source version would be a great thing for RT, because commercial enterprises that wanted the “optimized” version *would* pay for it. There’d be a lot more code out there produced by academics and free software hackers for them to be running. In the meantime, you have evangelists flocking to other languages, making them more accessible… volunteering to design pretty websites…

http://tryruby.hobix.com/

That could have been REBOL catching the world by storm! My hypothesis is that REBOL has failed to do this for reasons that are not at all based on a lack of technical merit… and I’d like to help hammer a few of them out if I can…

I will also remark that I find it funny to see your text above the form I’m typing this comment in:

“Please leave a valid email address, I promise I will not use it for anything evil.”

In the same way, you promise not to betray our trust by putting ads on your site. Well, no problem, I am willing to believe you. Even if I just learned of your existence this week. - But why shouldn’t I extend a bit of trust to other people as well; particularly someone who has been a public figure for almost a quarter century, who has contributed greatly to computer science, craft and society, who has helped me in my life and career through those products, and who is even occasionally helping me personally in business matters?

But first the misconceptions. I’d like to clarify what Graham said above. I am not the chief developer of ORCA [http://freshmeat.net/projects/rebol-orca/]; Karl Robillard is. I am not even the chief developer of the Syllable operating system [http://web.syllable.org], although I am its co-leader together with its founder. I am the creator of the Syllable Server Linux-based operating system [http://distrowatch.com/syllable], though. Both these operating systems use ORCA in their core. Syllable Server also ships REBOL/Core and a number of open source frameworks on top of it, but is not dependent on it. We hope to use them to build your flying cars someday.

As Richard Stallman tirelessly keeps reminding us, it’s bad to heap patent law, copyright law, trademark law and contract law together (and maybe call it intellectual property), because they’re very different. The Sun vs. Microsoft case you point to was about contract law, supported by copyright law and trademark law. MS simply signed a contract with Sun to get to use their Java code and broke the contract requirements. It even cost them a lot of effort to win, but Sun could never force an independent Java implementation to be compatible, or force them by law in other ways, if they don’t sign a contract with Sun, don’t steal their proprietary code, and don’t violate their Java and Sun trademarks. Even under US law.

Nobody who worked on ORCA has a contract affecting it with RT.

No RT C code was used in ORCA’s implementation (nobody outside RT even has it, probably even outside Carl, except for escrow). It’s not always possible to have mezzanine functions that don’t resemble the RT REBOL functions, especially if they’re very small, but that in itself is a proof that such cases are not significant engineering efforts, so they wouldn’t fall under copyright and patent law. I didn’t even know that the mezzanines in the RT SDK seem to have a permissive license, but the goal of the ORCA mezzanines is to be independent implementations (which may in some cases even be necessitated by a different underlying implementation of ORCA).

Carl has stated that the language at a conceptual level is a form of communication and not patentable in the US. That certainly means it’s not patentable in Europe, where software patents were eventually prevented. This is confirmed by many independent implementations of many other languages.

Presumably, RT could keep ORCA from explaining that it means “Open source REBOL Can be Achieved”. The working name for my Linux distribution was ReboLinux, but since both REBOL and Linux are trademarked, it would have been asking for trouble to release it under that name. As I said, the name ORCA is overloaded and has to change, anyway.

On to technical misconceptions. I didn’t say anything about ORCA’s efficiency, and certainly not that I would want to match REBOL’s by implementing mezzanines in C, instead. As far as I am concerned, the goals of ORCA are the same as those of REBOL, except for being open source. The level of implementation of each function, in C or in REBOL/ORCA, must be decided separately for each function in conjunction with the engine it’s running on. If you do these things well and are not oblivious to computer science and engineering craft, there is no reason that ORCA would have to be significantly bigger or slower than REBOL.

I also don’t see why an open-source REBOL project would be condemned to be run by “a skeletal crew”. Open source language projects range from dead and buried to hundreds of contributors.

To conclude, I think you know that the only certainties in this life we’re in are death and taxes. We must have a business sense about that. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask a company to issue a statement with the goal of making it easier for others to compete with them, without getting anything in return. Carl wants us to help, without fracturing his core, which is a semantic platform that would be prevented from fulfilling its promise if everyone would have an incompatible implementation. This problem is very real, as Karl Robillard has already gone in a different direction after ORCA with this Thune language. Things get fishy very quickly.

As I said before, apart from the core, RT releases many things under open-source licenses and in the public domain. Legally, it doesn’t get clearer than this. You can use them under copyright law according to their licenses.

I am writing these comments under an email address I set up particularly for your blog. If you turn capitalistic on us, or what you call “evil”, I can block it. I am including REBOL in Syllable, but I’m also including ORCA and making sure the base system is dependent on that and RT’s open-source code, instead of the REBOL core.

I’d like to believe that legal pressures wouldn’t be used to shut down an open REBOL implementation. And what you say about languages seems reasonable–that it cannot be patented–but much of copyright and patent law is not based on reason! You may remember the big controversy with Sun and Microsoft over Java…

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-01-2001/jw-0124-iw-mssuncourt.html

So it’s important to have an official word on the issue. If an open implementation of REBOL that shipped with the mezzanine would be considered a breach of the license or RT’s intellectual property, this must be established up front. Otherwise, open source developers should spend their time working on improving other languages and bringing some of the REBOL goodness to Python or Ruby.

I understand your feelings about wanting to make the open implementation match REBOL’s efficiency–even so far as to implement the Mezzanine in C! But an Open REBOL effort would almost certainly be running with a skeleton crew. Consequently, if the executable ended up being 2GB for just the core… this would be an acceptable tradeoff IF it meant that the code could keep pace with the evolving standard.

Attracting developers would rely on it not being a lot of custom code, but rather a minimalist and maintainable reinvention. Those few who are really intense about wanting the super small executable should be willing to pay RT for their proprietary and optimized version–they’ll come out ahead in the end, it’s worth the money. The point of the Open REBOL would be so that developers could not fear that there isn’t a free alternative to turn to in the case of RT taking some kind of unpleasant turn, or if a non-commercial enterprise wished to leverage a REBOL codebase.

Best,
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