[ale] Simplicity (in relationship to computers and programming)

[arxaaron]

On 2011/10/24, at 15:44 , Charles Shapiro wrote:

> Indeed they are enjoyable and intriguing.  I 'specially liked his
> "simplicity" one, as someone who has been guilty of
> makin' amazing little complicated languages.
>
> I remember looking at REBOL back before 2000.  It's exciting to see
> that it's still around.  Maybes I should take another pass at it.
>
> -- CHS

Quite a flashback, Charles...

Before 2000?  I'm thinking maybe it was 2001, but still, wow...
was it that long ago?

If I recall correctly I was working at the Innovox Internet Lounge at
the time and they provided a back room where we tried to do a
REBOL dog and pony show (with Carl Sassenrath live on the
REBOL chat client his 13 yr. old son wrote with using something
like 100 lines of code).  You and maybe 2 others showed up;
I'm remembering that the company you were working for was
considering REBOL as a solution for a distributed web
application project.

I also remember feeling that Carl was getting a little frustrated
at my inability to grok the big picture of what REBOL was all
about.  The differences to traditional computer languages and
data handling and networking seemed pretty subtle to me, more
a matter of unique underlying approach than methods of
practical application.

Another great idea I chalk up to Davinci's hellicopter syndrome.
Like the Amiga, this stuff may be too far ahead of the curve for
most people to appreciate the advantages or fully grok the
underlying concepts.

peace
aaron

PS:  It looks like this REBOL developer  in France is trying to
create an Open Source work alike called RED!
   <http://www.red-lang.org/>
I've always felt that if REBOL were Open Sourced and released
under GPL licensing it would really make it much a more viable
and widely embraced technology.



> On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Aaron Ruscetta  
> <arxaaron at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Carl Sassenrath is a "University of HP" graduate circa 1983.
>> Subsequently, in 1984, he designed the EXEC OS for the
>> groundbreaking Amiga computers.  It was a multi-tasking,
>> multi-threading, message based Operating System that
>> could run in as little as 256 Kilobytes of memory.
>>
>> In my personal stack of respected icons from the computer
>> industry Carl Sassenrath sits right next to Dennis Ritchie
>> and Linus Torvalds. (There are only a few others, and
>> names like Jobs and Gates aren't even on the system).
>>
>> For several years Carl's pet project has been developing the
>> REBOL language, which is fully supported across almost
>> all OS platforms (yes, including Amiga) with freely distributable
>> OS integrated interpreters / run time engines. I explored
>> REBOL briefly, and while I can't claim to have ever fully
>> wrapped my head around it's genius, the fact of the
>> language's genius seems self evident in its simplicity.
>>
>> Carl's REBOL blog has been quiet for several months,
>> but I found his post from March regarding a definition
>> of "Simplicity" quite intriguing:
>>     <http://www.rebol.com/cgi-bin/blog.r>
>>
>> His 2009 commentary on "The True Danger of Viruses
>> and Worms", written in response to the 'conflicker'
>> computer industry panic attack, is another particularly
>> cutting commentary:
>>     <http://www.rebol.com/article/0405.html>
>>
>> Hope you find these enjoyable and thought provoking.
>>
>> peace
>> aaron