[Edu-sig] Top 5 All Time Novice Obstacles => #3 Where am I ?

[Guido van Rossum]

On Rebol (which to my ears rhymes more with Cobol than with rebel :-),
I've not looked much at it personally, but I trust a close colleague
who has, and who finds it hard to use because the parser cannot know
the end of a function's parameter list -- that's only known at run
time, once the function is called.  Sounds like dead on arrival to me,
as far as language design goes.  So if we want to learn from Rebol, we
must try to learn from other ideas in it, not from the core language
design.

Flash: Around 1996 I was approached by Macromedia to become their
director of language design.  I declined, for a number of personal
reasons, and because I didn't think I would be able to steer them
sufficiently far away from where they were at the time.  Since then,
it appears that they have adopted Javascript; they could've done
worse.  Javascript shares some decent concepts with Python, in a more
traditional syntax.  (I think part of this may be due to Jim Roskind,
who was at Netscape at the time that JS was developed, but was an
early Python adopter at Infoseek before then.)

I'd like to add that Flash succeeded where Java applets have failed.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)