By Rachel Chalmers
Rebol Technologies Inc has announced Rebol/Command 1.0, a platform-independent internet communications language. It’s based on the company’s six-month old Rebol/Core, with extra functions and features for enterprise applications. What’s particularly interesting about Rebol – the company and the language – is their founder, Carl Sassenrath, most famous as the inventor of the venerated Amiga platform. Sassenrath told ComputerWire that he wrote Rebol in order to span all operating systems with a single technology. I didn’t see Java panning out very well, he explained, so I decided that we’d take a crack at it. Rebol is now up and running on 37 different systems.
Between C, C++, Visual Basic, Python and Perl, can the internet really support another language? Sassenrath says it can, and that Rebol has features the other languages don’t have. Rebol is not only the application, it’s the means of communication between the applications, he says. It’s a language that can be spoken between two machines. Rebol’s taken me twenty years to design. I was involved in SmallTalk in the early 80s, and I really got enamoured with that. I got sidetracked into thinking object- oriented design was going to solve all our problems. Twenty years later I realized, we haven’t made a great leap forward. Rebol is in part his response to that realization. Its special feature is the ability to create dialects, which are sub-grammars of the primary language. Stock transactions, for example, have a relatively small number of concepts associated with them – sell, buy, put, call. Using these dialects, software developers can create a language consistent with the Rebol design for E*Trade, Charles Schwab and other brokerage firms.
One consequence is that Rebol code should much more readable than code written in other languages – especially the webmaster’s darling, Perl. Perl is not pretty, Sassenrath says, it’s not easy to read. They call it a write once language. As for Java, he says that like SmallTalk, it takes extensive knowledge to use the language well. It takes over a year for an engineer to become really fluent within it, he says. By contrast: One line of Rebol will send an email. That’s not to say that Rebol is some kind of 4GL abstraction, he adds. It pretty much wraps layers around the complexity. One reason the Amiga was so popular for so long was that you could do things fairly simply at the first layer, then dive in downward, deeper into the abstraction. Rebol’s the same way. That should make for a smooth learning curve, without detracting from what the language can do. All the layers unfold in a very pleasant way, Sassenrath claims. Simple things are simple to do.
As for Python, Sassenrath calls it: an interesting language, but still what I would consider traditional, oriented towards programmers. I don’t think it’s as polymorphic with dates and times and money; Rebol has 40 data types built in. I look at Python every so often because the claims do sound very similar to Rebol. But I don’t see that Python creates this ability to do simple things simply. Then, of course, there is the new craze for XML, whose document type definitions (DTDs) sound rather like Rebol’s dialects. DTDs will take you so far, but when it comes to doing process side of things, you’re still going to have to drop into a language, Sassenrath says, Rebol is the logical endpoint in the evolution of XML.
Applications written in Rebol are on the way. One developer is writing an entire web site for handling payments online; another is modifying it for use inside a cellphone. With the release of Command, Rebol has gained ODBC support and the ability to call into other dlls and shared objects. Sassenrath sees a great future for his language inside wireless devices. It all adds up to something Redmond might label a platform threat. Sassenrath concedes the point. We know that Microsoft has been poking around our web site quite a bit, he says. We pose a threat to Microsoft, and to Ja
va too. We’ll deal with those things as they happen. When someone breaks out a checkbook, then it will be time to think about it. Sassenrath is nostalgic for the less paranoid Microsoft of years gone by. What I’d really like would be to flank them, he chuckles. I don’t think you can do this any more, but I’d love for them to wake up one morning and say: ‘Ooh! We missed this one!
