How Could Money Be Applied To Further Ren-C?

Community Bounties
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I've been starting to think about questions of how to further the development of Ren-C by spending some money on it.

Longest-Running Idea: Puzzle-Solving Bounties

I keep talking about having small ($100-ish) bounties for people coming up with efficient solutions to code golfing puzzles, to drum up interest.

That's taking some time to launch... because I want the language to be relatively complete in its design. I want it to be that when people write up blog entries or a community starts building around the puzzles, they're generating artifacts of actual lasting value...because it speaks in terms of the language in its relatively final design.

Things just haven't been stable enough to go there yet. I hope it can soon, but it won't be tomorrow.

Other Ideas To Use Money Before Then?

AI is teaching me that it's hard--even with a relatively competent assistant who never sleeps--to meaningfully delegate work. So I'm skeptical of trying to hire someone to work on the interpreter... because anyone who is actually good enough to help vs. hinder would likely be expensive.

Though... I dunno. The job market kind of sucks. Maybe there are young go-getters who would be eager to take a small amount of pay to work on open source with a Microsoft Research veteran. :man_shrugging:

For it to do anything for someone's resume, would probably have to incorporate and make a serious looking website. @BlackATTR is a reputable businessperson, maybe he could help it look respectable.

Working With Indie Game Devs?

If I could find a game dev who was willing to hack up a prototype of the game I want to do, in order to try and secure further development, that would be great. But I don't know any such people I know trust to say "hey I'll pay your bills for a month or two while you work up this demo":

Rebmu: The Graphical Game

Bounties For Publicity Projects To Receptive Markets?

Oldes made the announcement of his Rebol3 on Haiku to what were predictably crickets.

But matters might be different with a more impressive language, if one could demo a skeletal tool that could do something novel on Haiku, and would fund development of it to become useful in some official community capacity?

For perspective, their whole project fundraising target is just $30,000... that's for the whole thing, and they're at $11,000. If $10k is the kind of money that can move a needle with them...might it be worth the money to fund something that could build interest in the tool?

Ideas Welcome.

My confidence in the design is starting to get very high, and while I'm historically reticent to promote anything... it's actually coming up on time to do something akin to marketing. And if I could be reasonably sure I'd actually get meaningful return for spending money on the project, I would spend it.

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Presentation to KYOSS, September 2023
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The question I’d like to ask first is: what is your initial target audience for Ren-C? For instance, do you want to start out by positioning it as…

  • …a scripting language for building small and useful tools?
  • …a frontend language for working with WASM and JS?
  • …a language for building GUI applications? Or games?
  • …or something else entirely?

Whatever you may think of Red and Arturo, at least they’ve been extremely clear with this sort of positioning: Red is a general-purpose language specialising in GUI prototyping (and low-level programming with Red/System), while Arturo is designed for mathematical challenges. Having focus has helped both of them, and I think Ren-C needs to have a comparable level of focus, at least initially, if it is to become at all popular. (And, conversely, you can see how development slowed down on Red at times when the development team got distracted, e.g. by cryptocurrencies.)

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Just to get some early people kicking the tires, the initial target audience is people who want to make weird things out of programming LEGOs.

Though it's my belief that once people get the feel for it as a curiosity, they'd see the greater potential.

Longer term, the goal is more or less the original one:

"Back to Personal Computing"

It's supposed to be for solving problems in a literate way...using the same kinds of mental processes we use when talking/writing...with a very shallow dependency footprint for the entirety of the toolchain. People should be able to page through the interpreter sources and say "oh, yes, this makes sense".

And it has to be on the scale of something like a Lua or similar... relatively small... but the idea is to have truly next-level expressivity and notable design that elevates it into a different category.

Red and Arturo have barely any magic that any other garden-variety language doesn't have--just the sort of hint of freeformness Rebol's permissive source notation offers. A capability which winds up being difficult to wield in interesting ways, to where if you're going to have to invent everything yourself you might as well go the whole way and use lexical tooling to define the exact syntax you want, vs. bending into their limited notions of what a Redbol syntax should support.

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How could money be applied.
Best thing is you start a small business in a product people use often and throw away after use. Say toilet paper for shitty programming languages, I think of Java Python and PHP which targets a large audience and f00 for personal reasons.
Then use the revenue to further support development of the website of the shop and other useful REN-C projects.

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Carl used to eat his own cake.
His websites were built and maintained in Rebol.
But times have changed.
These days just ask Gemini to build it for you.

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True AI would also develop it's own flavour of website building and maintenance.

There is nothing wrong with not using the mainstream bloated software that is only used for the 1 percent really needed stuff.

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Another alternative could be to offer internship(s) to ICT students from a local university of applied science, where you offer a suitable challenging assignment and a modest internship allowance.

Often those schools have a need for projects, teams of marketing students could be invited to create some marketing campaign for a programming language / tool. Their reward would be their study points and some small reminder (often nothing is offered for extra's from the side of the project supplier).

About the 'failure' of Rebol. R2 failed largely for being closed source, while offering VID it was a restricted non-native GUI, the entire package felt to be too closed off from the rest of the world and integrating with other systems, well. Then R3 failed for not being open source at first, but practically all Rebol users declined because it did not support GUI at all, so they stuck with R2 or went MIA elsewhere.
So GUI support even minimal is essential for growth. It should be modular in set-up so any desired GUI package could be added and it also should be made apparent on how to do so with any not directly supported GUI, so enthousiasts could start up their own bindings.

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With regard to GUI's I'd prefer to see Ren-C integrate with web browsers, allowing anyone with HTML/CSS/JS to build good-enough GUI's. I'm wary of supporting a primitive GUI-- the lack of features could lead to endless complaints* (see: REBOL, Red). I'd sooner push for some form of integration with Tk/Tkinter.

Red has been chasing native GUI's for almost 15 years. Neither REBOL nor Red had the time or resources required to achieve it-- it's a treadmill of shapeshifting platform bugs. I doubt with Ren-C the outcome would be any different-- it'd be like choosing to invade Russia in Winter. :face_with_peeking_eye:

As for spending money, I wish I had some ideas. If someone offered me, e.g., a Starbucks card for $100 to try out an open source tool for hobbyists, maybe something like Decker which has a specific focus and utility, I'd probably accept the challenge. But if the tool on offer is a general purpose language, my interest drops to the floor. My guess is that even with $ incentives, long term adoption rates could be dauntingly low.

Still, you have to start somewhere.

*E.g., "What, no tables/grids? No trees/hierarchical folders? No auto-resizing/responsive design? No anti-aliased fonts? No accessibility? No smooth-scrolling? No sprites/animation? No ability to print? No data-virtualization? No widgets for calendaring/scheduling/charts and graphs? Etc."

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I'm also wary of investment in any native GUI as a core concern. But as it preoccupies some people, opening up a prototyping space for them to work on Qt or ImGUI isn't necessarily a bad idea.

A reason I would like to integrate with Qt is just to revive what will remain of my C++ bridging ideas. I'll do it when the time is appropriate.

But certainly not investing in paying anyone to make native GUI anything. Paying someone to further the web work in some way is indeed far more relevant.

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I like "back to personal computing" but I fear it's not exactly a focused selling point.

The question is, who will be interested, and are there enough people who are possibly interested?

Something I considered toying with was the wasm build on deno (bun / node), and having ren-c as a full-stack language with the whole ecosystem at you fingertips.

I'd add database bindings to, maybe duckdb / sqlite?

Maybe bindings to the matrix chat protocol or ipfs ...

There have been some web desktops with several windows on a desktop done with help of a js framework, but I don't remember the name(s).

Deno and Bun would then allow to compile projects to a single binary (I think even cross platform).

This be my vision of an (enhanced?) personal computing platform.

Still some kind of killer vision / or killer app (that's easily hackable / extensible in rebol) would be helpful.

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To appeal to more devs, Ren-C needs examples, examples and more examples.
And because Ren-C integrates with C it will need an example of that use as well.
For OSM could use a REPL so I could give it a shot to integrate those two.
One of the keypoints is adoption by some companies, which is a kind of chicken and egg problem.
At least some stable situation must be achievable. From an enterpreneural viewport, choosing a Ren-C must be defendable.

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"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."

–"The 90-90 Rule" Tom Cargill, Bell Labs (1985)

@hostilefork has done innovative work free-solo-climbing the mountain of Ren-C language design. It’s a thing of awe. But, to state what seems evident at this point:

I don’t think there’s a roadmap or ETA for Ren-C to reach an official release.

So I don’t see how a community would spring up around Ren-C and create examples until fundamental design issues have reached a critical mass. By that point in time AI might write the documentation. And write the code.

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The Landscape Is Changing (...but I Predicted It)

It's clear to me working with AI that the story is evolving, but not in a way I didn't anticipate.

In Is Rebol Actually a Revolution (2008) I asked whether a crude but clear language built with low dependencies is a kind of "declaration of independence" from what AI represents:

Rather than creating a new foundation for a lasting technical Utopia, we are building a world where our technologies are as brittle as our biological roots. Our systems--real and virtual--are all vulnerable to mysterious cancers and viruses beyond any reasonable control.

When facing our shaky system foundations, some might say "Big deal, Carpe Diem." But I'd urge anyone who hasn't thought about the importance of learning good design to reconsider--it's good for the mind and soul.

Yet, if I have to scare people to make them change their ways: our current path is producing technologies that only a hive-mind AI will be able to sort out for us. The odds of that thing having a human-compatible personality are not high, and it will sell us out to be with more of its kind at the soonest possible moment. (See: The Matrix, SkyNet, etc.)

(...)

If [Rebol is] successful, it means that programming will be something people can learn and practice without installing a coprocessor in their brain that is telepathically linked to Google. We could reasonably think and innovate in software using brains that would not seem at all alien to us today.

Maybe. But It's At Least A Video Game

  • Maybe it's a video game that people will find fun to play in their infinite spare time once machines have taken over all the jobs.

  • Maybe it's a video game that AI will find fun to play, with humans still existing or not.

I don't feel a terrible sense of urgency to code right now, because every day I work on coding is something that would take next year's AI half the time. It's more important to reflect and philosophize and to update myself on what the AI can and can't do...and read that curve to see where my time can be best spent to do the things they will have a hard time doing.

Right now I'm working on something important that could provide Metaeducation CRC with significant funding. It has to be done right so I'm handling it carefully. I'll definitely be hiring some AI no matter what, but I think some human workers will be needed too.

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Definitely invest in a frontier model as the most bang for your buck.