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Add to SafariWhen comparing Rebol vs Xojo, the Slant community recommends Rebol for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Rebol is ranked 51st while Xojo is ranked 53rd. The most important reason people chose Rebol is:
Rebol's name came from "Relative Expression Based Object Language". Rebol is a functional language and everything is an expression that returns a value. Things that have to be baked into the grammar in other languages are simple function calls with block arguments in Rebol.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Very simple syntax
Rebol's name came from "Relative Expression Based Object Language". Rebol is a functional language and everything is an expression that returns a value. Things that have to be baked into the grammar in other languages are simple function calls with block arguments in Rebol.
Pro Homoiconic
Code is data, and data can be code. Rebol is based on a simple block data structure, used both for data and for the code itself. Blocks can be manipulated programmatically, and then evaluated as code. This makes metaprogramming easy in Rebol.
Pro Human friendly
Almost natural language, for example: write %out.html read http://google.com.
Pro Graphical user interface
Beginners are usually stuck making command-line applications in other languages, because GUIs are too hard. Rebol GUIs are easy enough to start with.
Pro Domain specific languages
Rebol's simple homoiconic syntax makes it easy to create "Rebol dialects"--domain-specific languages optimized for a particular purpose. The Rebol distribution includes many of these, and users are free to create more. These DSLs make tasks that would be complicated to express in other languages easy.
Pro Easy to use
Easy to make compiled native apps.
Cons
Con Not (yet?) Free Software
Rebol 2's core is free (gratis) for commercial use, but the license prohibits modification, a violation of the DFSG. Rebol 3 is Free Software (Apache 2.0), but isn't production ready.
Con Very niche language
Small community.
Con No separators
A function call expression has no parentheses, and there are no separators between sequenced expressions, not even newlines. This means that you have to know the arity of every function in an expression to know how to parse it. It also means you can run into subtle, hard-to-find bugs if you don't provide enough arguments, since the result of the next expression will be passed instead.
Con Subscription-based/Not free
Using this product you're betting the company will still be around. If they get bought out by an enterprise that wants to use the tech internally, all they need to do is stop offering subscriptions and suddenly you're scrambling to rebuild your entire app on other technology.
Con No Android support
They plan to eventually support Android, but for now, they only support iOS.
