Sunday, March 3, 2013

What Rebol means to me

This is not a programming related post. It is a programmer-related, people-related post, but not a programming related post.

Instead of a well thought post, this one is just a 10 minute memory dump. :-)

Just a few days back, I was fooling around the different chat rooms at stackoverflow chat. As anyone familiar with SO chat will tell you, there are (online) rooms where SO users can talk about programming and whatnot.

I saw a room named "Rebol-and-Red" and thought the name was funny. Like the names of two people who are having a room for themselves... in SO terms, room for Rebol and Red. Without any apparent reason, I entered the room and started reading what the people there were writing.

I kid you not, within about 20 seconds, someone said "Hi, @KK."

So, I responded. This person started telling me about Rebol and how it relates to other languages we use, like LISP and C etc. And since it is a very small language download, this person made me download it and walked me through simple commands on the interpreter. A few other people, frequents in the room, jumped in the discussion. I liked the attention that I was getting from better, older, better, mature, better  programmers.

Later in the evening that day, I again went to this room. Again the same. Then the next day. One more day. Another day.

Rebol is an odd programming language, but what made me stick to it was the great, ultra-friendly, noob-helping community. You did not get yelled at for asking a silly question, or for asking a silly question 2 times, or n times. :-)

Another thing I liked about it is the variety of people that I met in the Rebol room. Apparently, Brian "hostilefork" Dickens is a very cool person who will do anything in his power to help make Rebol a more accepted language. Graham Chiu is a doctor who treats Rebol like this motorcycle one maintains after work. Then there are the core implementors for Rebol: Christopher Ross-Gill (see his all-purpose utility scripts), BrianH, Andreas "earl" Bolka, Sunanda, Ladislav, and programmers all between the spectrum, like Adrian Sampaleanu, Jina, Randall "somekittens" Koutnik, MaxV, Benjamin Gruenbaum, Petr Krenzelok (pekr), Rebolek and a bot called Rebolbot, made by Dr. Chiu. Nenad Rakocevic, who goes by the name dockimbel works on a compiled Rebol-like language called Red. Peter WA Wood also hangs in the room sometimes, and he is one of the core implementors of Red.

I love chatting with these guys, and use a bit of rebol, only as a hobby. Lets see how long this affair with Rebol goes, but as long as I am with it, I love it.

I am indebted to these great people for their help and insights in making me get familiar to Rebol, and even more thankful for the jokes and other non-Rebol talk that we share in the Rebol room.

To anyone I did not mention or mentioned incorrectly, feel free to come to Mohali/Kharar, India and smack me in the head :-)

No comments:

Post a Comment