Presentation to KYOSS, September 2023

Usage Show & Tell
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"So Long :pizza: And Thanks For All The Pizza"

Right before leaving Louisville after living there a year, I gave a presentation to the Kentucky Open Source Software Group.

It was half slides, and half live demo of Ren-C (using the WebAssembly build).

Because many of the people who attend the meeting are IT workers and not software developers, my talk was more relating the story of the open sourcing of a closed source project... what the red flags (pun intended) are about that... etc.

I didn't record the live demo but it was nothing particularly special.

At that time, things were rigged up where VOID was what you needed to get no output in the display, and PRINT was returning TRASH!.

So it was showing something like:

>> when 1 = 2 [print "Void results weren't displaying"]

>> print "Hello"
Hello
== \~\  ; antiform (trash!) "tripwire"

So really it was during this presentation where I realized "okay, I don't like this for new users". Something had to change, it was too jarring. Hence today's conclusions about TRASH! not displaying in the console, and VOID displaying.

>> when 1 = 2 [print "Voids display now (and are antiforms)"]
== \~[]~\  ; antiform (pack!) "void"

>> print "Hello"

An observation I'll make about that is that it can be easy to sit around and theorize about things here on the forum, but sometimes going in front of a room of people who don't have any context and explaining stuff to them adds some pressure to make a realization that you need to make another decision.

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The last slide of the 2023 presentation said:

  • Interest peaked around 2019, when Ren-C was the focus of a conference in Philadelphia: Talks | Rebol [2019]

    • People were excited about WebAssembly and integration with JavaScript in the browser

  • With my deliberate choice to focus on fundamental design questions vs. recruiting younger users, the existing older userbase falls away as time passes

    • Because I know the unsolved questions so well, I warn people not to get too invested

    • I myself have made relatively few commits this year

    • I've thought about making the end "product" a research paper, instead of shipping code

Daring souls can still participate! :crossed_swords: Join https://rebol.metaeducation.com

Circa 2025, I Am Much More Confident!

There have been a lot of advancements in two years!

I'm now more-or-less committed to seeing this through to publication, and making what investments it takes financially to seeing it be marketed successfully.

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