George-Zipperlen

Introductions
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George Zipperlen, speaking at you:

New to Rebol, thanks to @hostilefork presentation at Philly Lambda functional programming meetup, and invite to Rebol [2019] conference.

Started out in pure math, first language APL -- Just get things done !
Rude awakening to FORTRAN

Ruder awakening to PL/I and JCL

Systems programming in Pascal, and assembler because Pascal forbids you to...

C / Unix / shell, sed, awk, perl, TCL -- more getting things done and shooting myself in foot.

SQL, MatLab, S/R -- powerful, but slow and clunky

CommonLisp for natural language processing -- Ugh!

Smalltalk for digital telephony -- loved it

C++ and Java -- rude awakening from the pleasures of object oriented programming to obsessive inheritance hierarchies. Revenge of the Pascal nanny

Python, somewhat elegant. Machines now fast enough that it's usable...

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Welcome to the community George!

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Hey George, thanks for coming to the conference! Welcome to the (small) club!

The more languages one has seen, the better. I think that Python experience is especially relevant for us right now, to understanding whatever that sweet spot is that people have found from it. I've used Python, but would be hard-pressed to say what makes it so beloved relative to other options (what can it do that JavaScript isn't likely to do just as well?). In the WASM space I suggested looking at Pyodide for comparison with what we are doing:

https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide

For getting started with Rebol... Ren-C has a lot of rough edges, especially in the documentation space. There's a work in progress to emulate Rebol2, so there's no harm in learning the better-documented Rebol2/View, if that's where you'd like to get started, maybe working through some tutorials on that:

http://www.rebol.com/docs/setup.html
http://www.re-bol.com/rebol.html

Chat on StackOverflow is often just me talking to myself :slight_smile: but pretty much any topic is fair game. All one needs are 20 points, which are easy to get if you ask Rebol questions...which only we read and answer, pretty much:

https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/291/rebol

Again, welcome!

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