“The idea behind Rebol was to create a simple language close to
human languages, like a dialect… sort of. Carl Sassenrath, the
founder of Rebol is well known in the computing field since he
worked for Apple, Commodore, HP… The Amiga community for
instance, owes him a lot. Why talking about the Amiga? The main
particularity of the AmigaOS is compactness. The latest version
(3.5) of the OS, is less than 20 MB. This may sound strange for
newcomers who started to work with OSes (or so) between 200 and 600
MB.”
“This is to explain that people forgot about small size as far
as development was concerned. The tools available are quite
numerous and scripting languages are quite useful. Nevertheless,
they often imply many lines of code, whatever you want to do with
them. Usually, these languages are used for specific tasks. Perl or
Rexx for instance are much appreciated by Sysadmins. Obviously, you
can do much more than network administration with languages such as
Perl.”
“Nevertheless, talking about versatility and compactness, Rebol
is a model. We could say you can do just everything with Rebol. The
limit doesn’t come from the language but from your imagination.
Let’s make a quick guided tour.”