ivory_towerWARNING: this is not a post for the faint-hearted. You must abide to the visitation agreement that you are 18 years++ old. Please imagine that you have to check the little box

“I have read this Agreement, understand it, and accept its terms”

OK ? If Yes Goto Next Else If Exit!

Well, I had a long night, I missed some sleep, this may explain why I feel depressed and need to do this confession. Please indulge me just for once! Also I’m not native english so read twice if you do not understand :)

tesseractSince I was about eight years old, I was wondering about the Universe. Whereas other Children would ask questions like “why the sky is blue ?”, I had weird questions like: “Why can we only see 3 dimensions ?” (I wasn’t a little Newton to figure out the projection of a Tesseract). I asked that question to my school teacher at that time, she could never answer me, instead she stared at me as if I was a child of an alien from the Orion Galaxy (so the eyes of Orus in the picture above) :).

cosmologyLater on I wanted to become a Cosmologist but finally gave up as I told myself: “What if I have to search all my life but still got no answer?”. I chose some more common fields in Maths, Physics, Statistics and Biology but was keeping a profound interest for Cosmology. So one day I heard about the Grand Unification Theory (TGU) which tries to solve the Paradox between Einstein’s General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Super String Theory is until today the mainstream theory (though contested as purely mathematical) for TGU. This theory predicts that in “Reality”, our Universe may have at least 12 dimensions (so my question when I was a child wasn’t so stupid! ).

super_string_theoryEver since I have always looked for Unification in any field including Software Engineering. I naturally get interested in UML or Unified Modeling Language (though as there are 9 types of element for where you would expect a single One as the name implied, I sometimes doubt …), then in RUP or Rational Unified Process … yeah, in case you didn’t get it, I would buy any sandwich that that is “Unified” ;)).

Sometimes I don’t even need the adjective in the name to recognize it. The proof that I am more clever than just buying a good name is precisely the case for Rebol, when I read this on the Language presentation:

Problem: computer-to-computer semantic exchange

The server, the client, and the message are all REBOL

Simple things are simple

A single ubiquitous model of distributed computing

schrodinger_cat_wantedOh my “Grand Unification Theory” is not explicitely there but I can recognize a Cat even when it is the Schrödinger Cat !

But if ever I had any doubt about the probability that it was really what it was supposedly to be (do you still follow me ? Oh I don’t doubt, if you have achieved to read up to that point …), Carl Sassenrath’s Interview in Dr Dobbs one year later, definitely convinced me:

carl_sassenrath_thumb“Over the past two decades, my search for the perfect scripting language led me to work with companies such as HP, Amiga, and Apple. In that time, I investigated more than 50 different languages, from Ada to C, from Pascal to Lisp. I wanted a language that was very simple and readable with almost no syntax, yet very flexible with a wide degree of expressive freedom. In the mid 1980s, I stumbled across a mathematics called denotational semantics, which provided great insights into the structure and meaning of language.”


Carl Sassenrath
, Rebol’s God Father, in Dr Dobbs - Architecture & Design - January 01, 2002

Now what really makes Carl Sassenrath a genious over intellectuals in their Ivory Tower is that Rebol has practical use and so easy to learn people won’t even suspect the profound philosophy behind. That’s the real beauty of an Elegant Universe Architecture: its Invisibility to the Common Mortals (can you “see”, in this PBS video, the hypothetical one behind our “Reality(ies)” ?)!

Last but not the least, since you have now been initiated to the deepest Mystery of Rebol, will you be able to keep the Secret secret, some could not ;)


PBS Nova The Elegant Universe Quantum Physics / String theory

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