REBOL, the beginning

First of all, extremely short facts about REBOL ..

REBOL (Relative Expression Based Object Language) is a programming language designed by Carl Sassenrath, the man behind AmigaOS. It was first released in 1997 and is extremely lightweight and cross-platform.

So, why would I care for REBOL? I, by the way, am an aging software developer with a love for the penguin OS and opensource, and are old enough to remember when KDE 1.0 where unstable.

I will care - because I am extremely curious, I've played around with a lot of languages (but get my paycheck for doing Java & C#) but have to admit I never saw anything like REBOL. That is why I plan to play around with it some more, and report whatever strange enlightenments I will receive.

For starters - get REBOL from here, installation on windows is only a matter of running the exe file. (On windows 7 - I did have to do it as an administrator though).

For Ubuntu, it seem to be a little bit more troublesome. I have only tried it once on Ubuntu 10.04 during lunchbreak. The REBOL Desktop segfaulted upon me but the console and the script seem to work. I'll dig deeper into that later, so if patience isn't one of your virtues go ahead and give the tar.gz file a shot.

When REBOL is installed, fire up the Rebol console and start playing, why not with the traditional

alert "Hello world"

Now.. with that out of the way, stay tuned...