Rebol
I was recently introduced to
Rebol, an interesting programming language / framework. It's been around for a while, making some
headlines a few years ago, but I just heard about recently. It's at least interesting to play with for several reasons:
- It's very internet aware.
- It's extremely terse - check out this page of one liners.
- The runtime is tiny - the core is 280K, and the GUI layer is 327K.
- It runs on 25 platforms, including Windows, *nix, and Mac. I think it runs on Palm OS, too.
- An IE Plugin was just released (well, Beta 4, but it seems to work fine for me). I think a recent change to the IE Plugin architecture caused them to have to rewrite this; they had an IE Plugin a while ago.
Now, I'm no Rebol zealot, I've just played with it for a few hours. This is interesting stuff to play with from a developer point of view, though - it kind of challenges your ideas of what a modern development platform can and should do.
I'm sure there are business / political things involved with the business success of this technology, which I'm not at all interested in.
Some fun stuff:
1. IE Plugin Demos
Check out the Calculator. Now the crazy part - the entire source is less than 1K.
2. This one liner will e-mail the contents of a web page:
write you@email.com read http://www.rebol.com
3. The IOS (Internet Operating System) - http://www.rebol.com/reblets.html