Rebol Tutorial

Why Carl Sassenrath was and still is one of the 30 Most Influential People In Programming

amigaworld_firstcover_1985 Webdesigndev listed Carl Sassenrath as “one of the 30 Most Influential People In Programming” but does the young generation ever heard of him as he did enter the Legend of History of Personal Computing in the ninety eighties nearly 25 years ago ? So let’s travel back to the past.

According the History of Computing Project, the Amiga 1000 created by Jay Miner and its OS designed by Carl Sassenrath, “causes an enormous shock among the users. The computer is so advanced for its time that even the marketing department of Commodore does not know what they are up to.”

Amiga 1000 was the first graphical multi-tasking environment, and also, as Byte magazine, in 1994, remembered as “the first multimedia computer… so far ahead of its time that almost nobody–including Commodore’s marketing department–could fully articulate what it was all about.” Even 20 years later, PC World still rated the Amiga 1000 as the 7th greatest PC of all time and the 37th best tech product of all time.

3D animation, full-motion video, fancy TV processing, four-voice stereo sound chip, speech synthesis, all this allowed the birth of Multimedia softwares like Soundtracker, the first “tracker-style” music sequencing program. At that time, the IBM PCs didn’t even do color!

Since that time, Carl Sassenrath has always fancied great vision of what the future of Computing could be. He’s still very active and the Architect behind a language named Rebol. Programming Language is not as fancy as Computer or OS to get support from the mass, but for sure, Carl Sassenrath has inspired other great language Architects like Douglas Crockford who crafted JSON (see Yahoo Webminar on the JSON Saga) and probably others who won’t explicitely give the source of their inspiration but just compare the syntax of JavaFX with Rebol VID, …

Carl Sassenrath is still bringing the Revbolution, albeit silently, through JSON and DSL (Domain Specific Language). Martin Fowler is now publicizing in this InfoQ video that DSL, maybe still combined with underlying Application Frameworks, is the real way to simplify Software Design and Implementation, not complex XML Configuration.

But Rebol’s DSL is still beyond current DSLs, because these DSLs are still static and not so easy to create (yet, if you want to tackle this, I recommend to read this excellent 320 pages on “Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide”). Rebol’s DSL creation is dynamic and almost as easy as 123. It could be used as External DSL sitting on top of internal DSL or fluent interface which may be still hard to read. I have given an example here by wrapping yUML DSL with Rebol’s DSL. Doug Finke, Microsoft MVP, told me on twitter it was a slick idea ;).

So why not integrate Rebol in your architecture in front of your Business Layer Service for example through Web Services (it’s easy as Rebol also claims to be a “messaging language” with all standard network protocols and even custom build protocols are easily possible)? Your Users may love it for it can really bring Creativity and Productivity and so the needed real Business Value in those time of crisis.