Rebol Altme

As soon as IE hits this blogspot blogger site this PM (ADT) today, ProcessExplorer shows IE consuming almost all CPU cycles - and with no end in sight, I keep killing it.  But Opera just opened on the site fine.  So I won't try Chrome.  No point in acting paranoid ...

And then there's Rebol.  It seemed today from an announcement in the altme.com Rebol3 'world' that a testable combo of runtime+DLL+gui-code was available.  But it fails immediately on any test I tried. OK - it's based on code that is not even in the R3 alpha yet, so no big deal.  I'll tinker with it and someone may post something on the style issue involved (some essential path type is finding a none! value.)

But altme.  This is the public face of Rebol these days.  Oh vey.  Not that I am so crazy about the curl.com developer site at developers.curl.com not being written in Curl ... but at least that site is largely useable and searches well with things such as google site:curl.com

Imagine (as I hop in and back out of the HTML editor in the WYSIWYG editor) - oh hang it, I give up on editing this post.

Of course what is far worse is this Google-owned blog editor in which I find myself at the moment.  It repeatedly traps a user in a blockquote element or in an em element - and it is not just a problem with some one browser.  It is all but impossible to post a simply formatted text without spending time in the HTML edit page. Okay. HTML is markup ...

And facebook - suddenly putting a url in a status makes it impossible to get rid of a web snippet that it shovels into the status update.  Give me twitter's fewer characters any day ...

And this blog's edit interface just screwed up two "carriage returns" in a row ...

Then there is the Rebol showcase web site which is not smart enough to set the background in CSS ... such very smart and capable and inventive people but a result that looks so dumb it doesn't matter how smart it is.

But there is always Microsoft OneNote:  a software pkg that by-and-large works and it mostly adequate to the task.

Question: how many x100 megabytes must an editor be so that it can format a short latin-encoded text [non-technical English] in simple paragraphs and emit it in a DOC format?  It must be a Monday. And I'm north of 45 deg LAT and its both warm and raining on Dec 13. Something's not right ...

There is hope for Rebol3 GUI: I see what style code did for Curl GUI's and such chrome will do the same for Rebol GUI''s.  What would be worthwhile would be for an historian of technology to document just how difficult it has been to move from Rebol2 to Rebol3 - difficult for such very bright and dedicated people.

But what explains why an altme/safeworld is so dismal: no simple reply metaphor (topics, not threads), no tagging (which is now all but universal) and no one able to step up to the plate and make a signature app outa that thing.  What vexes me most is the notion that there was some advantage to be had in writing the darn thing in Rebol at the very point when it had been acknowledged that Rebol had to be significantly re-thought in order to be used for PITL.

On the positive side is the web bug tracking - but that has also become near universal.

In a sad parallel, Smalltalk is only now arriving at Metacello for a sane approach to loading Metacello packages.  For years loading open-source Smalltalk packages has been a near total crap-shoot.  And that from the folks who gave us class browsers, refactoring browsers, unittest frameworks, the wiki, eXtreme programming ... but Metacello configurations appears to be a strategy that is working - both for Squeak Smalltalk and for Pharo Smalltalk.  Is there hope for Cincom VisualWorks Smalltalk ?  Their public code repository is those nightmare in which those use it to commit code are used to it and continue to use it ("Isn't it great?") but they also wonder that Smalltalk does not catch on.  Just compare Ruby gems any day.  Python virtualenv may be an embarrassment that is less than a kludge, but at least it works as intended.