Herd programming
An analogy: programming today is like creating RGB drawings using colour pickers that don’t allow you to use R. You can do it (e.g. switch to CMYK), but, it ain’t as easy as if you had a colour picker that gave you an R. You work less efficiently because you have to screw around in a domain that isn’t exactly in line with what you’re thinking. You need to take more steps to get from point A to point B.
In programming, all of the stuff you need is in assembler, BUT, it ain’t convenient to use in many cases. Rebol, Forth, Lisp, Smalltalk give you programming-pickers that fit with single aspects of programming. Just about all “modern” programming languages, though, filter out one of the options and herd you into exactly the same way of solving problems.
I found using Lisp, Forth and Smalltalk to be much easier ways to think about most classes of problems than what “modern” programming languages want to herd me towards.
I never used Rebol, but, it’s obvious to me that Sassenrath got huge mileage out of that style of thinking. Rebol boils down to assembler, after all, just like Haskell and Python and Rust and WASM, etc., but, Sassenrath developed a notation that let him express solutions to specific problems much more succinctly than most “modern” languages. Rebol weighs in at less than 1M, whereas that seems unachievably small where “modern” languages are concerned. Sector Lisp is even smaller. Sector Lisp herds you into programming without mutation (really, truly without mutation). When we stuff mutation into a Sector Lisp derivative, we bloat the language by a factor of 10x. Something is wrong with this picture. Is it really worth doing it this way?
Appendix - See Also
References
https://guitarvydas.github.io/2004/01/06/References.html
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