Jason Cunliffe wrote: >Hi Steve, Gregg & list > >Thanks.. Yes I think everyone here on the list feel that rebol 'rocks' in >multiple ways.. > >>Rebol takes the fragile-ness out of Internet programming, and provides >>safe solid and simple ways for developers and users to incorporate the >>Internet into their multimedia applications. >> > >Q1: How+why does it take the "the fragile-ness out of Internet programming" >? >To answer that we must answer what makes it fragile to begin with.. > Maybe one question at a time?
Software Engineering has long been an oxymoron. I suspect it was a term made to glorify the practice of hacking,but give it better sound bytes and a justification for higher salaries. The "Software Problem" was highly publicized in the 1980's and 1990's, and Object-Oriented Programming was touted to be the solution, but has grossly failed to deliver. In fact, I would be as bold to say that the "Software Problem" has gotten worse, and Software is now even more fragile. I note people being afraid to upgrade (let's call it upgrade-a-phobia, the fear of the fragility of fresh newly written code) to the latest versions, whether Netscape, Internet Exploder, or even GVIM, The "Software Problem" was approached for a while with Application Frameworks, trying to make it more difficult for programmers to lock-up the system with errant code. These were kinda cool as they were introduced, but their APIs or SDKs became mired in complexity, and again, the cure was worse than the disease. Part of the problem was that when C was invented (and I have worked with C since Bell Labs introduced it in the 1970's) was that it was supposed to be portable, but if you read the first chapter of the C books, you will see (pun intended) that the OS was blatently ignored, and as with the traditional over-specialization approach we inherited from the "Industrial Revolution" the language and the OS were carved apart, destroying the fun part of programming, which early Basic rom interpreters had (a holisting thing) where the language and OS were married together, and made programming and experimentation easy. And can't leave out Smalltalk. Those early Basic and Smalltalk interpreters were pretty robust, and if you crashed something, well, at least you could work your way out, and the OS tried to give you some information about the crash. Then Java tried again to marry the OS and language, but picked a too-static language, but it was a good try, and brought some light to the technical Software darkness of the late 1990's. So Rebol is a holistic language plus environment which lets you crash your code safely, even safer than JVM. And I find this less fragile for programming. And the framework in it is much better than I could do myself, (in fact, better than anyone in the world could do themselves, except Carl Sassenrath, who knows how to pack those bytes in there with maximum power) so when I write a Reblet, it is less fragile, because it has an architecture beneath it which does the dirty work. Not sure if that answers your Q1, but thought I would give it a stab. Beats working...;-) Steve Shireman "The Computer Revolution _Has_ Started..." > -- To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, without the quotes.
