Advocacy
From DocBase
This document is for community ideas and suggestions related to promoting REBOL.
It would be nice to have a matrix or priority ranking, so we can see what our targets are, and how important each is.
See also: Marketing_Strategy_Websites
What is the intended use?
http://www.rebol.com/rebol3/motivation.html#section-2
While the above link goes to "The Target Market", there is really no target market defined. There is a broad intended use laid out: lightweight distributed applications. It's important to read the actual description for that as RT defines it, because your interpretation may differ. For example, 'distributed' does not have anything to do with distributed computing and 'applications' means small, single-purpose tools. It says larger apps are just frameworks to hold many smaller apps, but it doesn't say if REBOL is intended to be used to build those larger apps/frameworks.
Who is the audience?
A key question is who we are advocating REBOL to. In order to appeal to an audience, REBOL has to have something to offer. It may be a feature of the language itself, something to do with its licensing or promise of future support, the ability to integrate with another tool or system, or the community surrounding it.
What do we need in order to advocate REBOL?
This section can be a simple list of target audiences and what is needed to market to them. There will be generalities, links, and overlap of course. For example, appealing to Python programmers may require that REBOL be Open Source. Open Source developers being a separate audience with their own wants and needs.
Take care in how you say it
This is an important point to understand: Over the years, many of us think very highly of REBOL; however, programmers tend to get upset if you blatantly state "language A is better than language B," especially if it's on their forum or wiki.
It becomes even worse if they don't understand how REBOL works and just compare REBOL with what they know about their language -- a shallow comparison that does not consider semantics, symbolics, size, complexity management, or expressive power. For example, Ruby programmers will tell you that Ruby does everything that REBOL does (they don't understand the full depth of REBOL, because they've never experienced it.) So, don't be harsh, because it will just backfire. It's better to use more of a "have you ever considered" type of attitude.
REBOL is not Lisp
When promoting REBOL, I wouldn't take the strategy of saying it's like Lisp, because actually, it's not that much like Lisp, especially to a Lisper. Certainly, it has many of the characteristics of Lisp, like taking a functional and symbolic language approach, but under the hood, there's actually nothing implementationally in common between the languages (at the core, Lisp is node-based and REBOL is vector-based). Saying REBOL is like Lisp may scare away more perspective users (who had bad experiences with Lisp) than it will add. And, quite frankly, you won't make any converts out of Lispers. They tend to be very well rooted in their methods.
Also, don't be tempted to get into the "vectors are better than nodes" debate. Although vectors are better suited toward modern high-speed parallel processing architectures, nodes have a clear win in the domain of list insertion and removal costs.
A good place to start
There are many websites that serve as a survey of programming languages or an archive of useful code clips or tips. Most of them do not mention REBOL. Why? I've found that REBOL is not intentionally left out, they simply did not know about. They did not see it on other websites or in other language collections.
Many of these websites are good places to promote REBOL or at least add it to the list along with other languages.
Website Lists
Sites that mention REBOL
list of URLs where REBOL is mentioned
Sites that should mention REBOL
list of URLs where REBOL should be added
Sites that probably should not mention REBOL
list of URLs where REBOL should not be listed for one reason or another (because it's not the right fit for the viewers of that site).
Audiences and their needs
Open Source advocates
Large corporations
Small businesses
Consultants, custom solution developers
Shareware authors
Freeware Authors
Hobbyists
Education
Non-profits
Government
Commercial application developers
Windows
OS X
Linux
Programmers coming from other languages
C, C++
Flash
Java
Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, Caml
Lispers talk a lot about building their own languages, which is what REBOL is all about too. Would it make sense to do a REBOL-in-REBOL example, like lisp-in-lisp is sometimes done? Or show them how to make REBOL look like Lisp?
defun: func ['word 'args [paren!] 'body [paren!]] [
set word func to block! args to block! body
]
defun dbl (n) (n * 2)
Logo, Forth, other "specialized" languages
.NET (C#, VB)
Perl
PHP
Python
REBOL (existing community)
Ruby, Rails
Smalltalk
Web developers (CGI, HTML, CSS, JS, XML, JSON)
Other groups
*nix geeks and admins
Agile and TDD developers
Q&A
We should build an exhaustive list of high and low-level questions (with answers, of course) regarding the language which will server to better identify what is different about Rebol and many of its different and fundamental idioms.
Some of these might simply be useful as a historic reference to pointy decisions which had to be taken that might seem odd to newcomers to the language or even as a reminder to experts.
The language itself
Q: What are the main features of Rebol?
- Human readable syntax
- Its expressiveness, via many native datatypes
- Transparent network & device messaging
- Dialects (our term for DSLs, Domain Specific Languages)
- Simplicity in creating GUIs
- Parsing
Q: What other languages inspired Rebol?
Q: is Rebol an Object Oriented language?
Q: Is Rebol a Functional Language?
Q: why doesn't Rebol use parentheses on function calls?
Q: Why does Rebol have so many Datatypes?
The platform
Q: Does Rebol have an official IDE (Integrated Development Environment)? No, though it is easily integrated into any modern text Editor which provides most the essential requirements of an IDE like syntax highlighting, script execution, word completion, etc. Some commercial and open source editors even have a REBOL setup built-in.
Q: Does Rebol require me to learn a large framework in order to leverage it full potential?
A: No, though it has a lot of built-in data manipulation functions which are as close to a framework as you'll get.
Rebol/View, the GUI engine, is understandably more structured, but is easy to use without any prior programming skills.
Odds & Ends
Q: How Old is Rebol?
Q: Who is the lead designer/architect of the language?
Carl Sassenrath
