Interesting discussion. I like the notion of PHP finding its niche with serving web pages.
I'm not sure what REBOL's niche would be. REBOL was designed as a messaging language. I think I'd be struck down to hear someone say, "Boy, you need to get your hands on a good, solid messaging language!" Or, likewise, "Where can I find a dynamic, highly-reflective metaprogramming language when I need one." :^) I think that REBOL's strong point is it's convenience. I like the fact that I can fire up the interpreter on Windows or OS X and use it to manage my local data files with minimal fuss. Or that I can parse & extract content from web pages quickly. In this personal productivity/end-user programming space, I'd like to see stronger ways of managing/launching automated scripts, like a cron-job on the *nix platforms. The areas where I find REBOL is not so simple is in managing errors, networking, encryption, xml and building DSLs. I'm not saying the power isn't there, just that you need to have a good deal of expertise in these areas to leverage these features. Oddly, many of the aforementioned features might be considered central to the idea of "messaging". If REBOL could make these things much more accessible and simple, and co-opt more of the SOA terminology, I think RT could enjoy more acceptance as a quick & dirty scripting language for plumbing enterprise architectures (as well as public ones, amazon S3, etc.). REBOL needs to enable the type of programming experience and end-user apps that people are not getting from current scripting languages and tool-sets. See "We have lost control of the apparatus" for more on anticipating the needs of future users: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control-of-apparatus.html Regards -- To unsubscribe from the list, just send an email to lists at rebol.com with unsubscribe as the subject.
