Steve, Is This Goodbye?
Last year, I welcomed Steve to the REBOLution.
Recently, I noticed that all of his REBOL-related posts (and Adobe AIR-related posts) are gone and he’s renamed the blog to Thornton on WPF. He announces it this way:
I’ve been writing software for over twenty years and I’ve tried most development system available.
I wish him the best, even though I’ll need to find a new example of how quickly someone can pick up REBOL if he or she is motivated and applies himself / herself to the task. Steve makes his living by his programming, so he needs to find (and use) what works best for him. Besides, Steve may be back after R3 is released.
Steve is not coming back.
I am like him. I don’t think there is any future with rebol. It’s dead to me. No point in continuing using a language with no future. It never had .
mrmrjustin
Friday, 2009-October-09
mrmrjustin says:
Reply: No future? That’s a rather harsh assessment. I would say that its viability for future projects depends on what segment you’re in. If you’re selling custom products to large or middle-sized companies (or gov’t agencies), you’re probably right. The choice of tools at such companies is guided more by inertia and thick policy books than by any intelligence and intentional direction.
One look at a WPF book in Barnes and Noble makes it clear that WPF isn’t for someone who doesn’t have lots of time to fiddle around. Complexity atop complexity. Seems even more complex than Java. No thanks.
I would expect that Rebol as a language will flourish in certain niches, particularly outside of the oversight of corporate PHBs and architecture astronauts. And yet, being so closely tied to the company Rebol Technologies and founder/language creator Carl Sassenrath, the success or failure of that company will be mirrored in the success or failure of the language. I really wish that RT’s business model allowed them to release a full language spec and allow multiple independent implementations thereof (possibly for a fee), simply because it would help make using Rebol a much less risky choice for many projects.
I think Rebol fulfills a role similar to the early days of Perl–crafting small, task-specific tools–except that when you come back in three months, you don’t have to rewrite from scratch to understand what it does.
lnxwalt
Monday, 2009-October-26