D. Crockford on JSON: "An influence was Rebol, a shame it’s not more popular" | Hacker News Reader

D. Crockford on JSON: "An influence was Rebol, a shame it’s not more popular"

dzone.com

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JSON had a lot of influences on its design. It didn’t just come out of my head. It’s based on a lot of things that I had observed over the years. The first – maybe the greatest – influence was Lisp. The thing that was brilliant about Lisp was it used exactly the same representation for programs and data. Originally, the idea was that you would have programs that could act on themselves as data, and do interesting things. … Another influence was Rebol. Rebol’s a more modern language, but with some very similar ideas to Lisp, in that it’s all built upon a representation of data which is then executable as programs. But it’s a much richer thing syntactically. Rebol is a brilliant language, and it’s a shame it’s not more popular, because it deserves to be.

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Rebol is 100% proprietary. To be popular it would have to offer a huge advantage over all of the other decent free languages. As far as I know this is not the case.

I think a 'law' could be made out of that principle.

Any proprietary language has to be significantly better than its rivals to gain traction, and if it does gain traction a free implementation or alternative will eventually appear.

I think I'd have to add "general-purpose" into the mix. Complex proprietary niche languages seem to be able to survive a long time without competition. Especially true when the users of the proprietary language are not themselves computer programmers and nobody has the skill to just start creating competition. (Which is why mathematics does have some open options; there's enough skill crossover to make things like Octave possible.)

Octave is decent at what it does, but nothing in the open source world comes remotely close to Mathematica. Having easy access to it (and more importantly, being able to expect my peers to have the same) is one of the things I miss most about being a student. Wolfram's recent price cut for non-student personal use is alluring, though. Some time soon I might break down and pay for it.

I wasn't claiming it was a replacement, just that it, well, exists. Other proprietary areas don't have any open source competition where the target audience has even less overlap with "programmers".

I think octave is targeting matlab ddirectly, though mathmatica is obviously another competitor to both.

I consider "being the only thing that serves the niche" a huge advantage. Same goes for "being bundled as the only scripting language for commercial product X" (like AutoLISP, especially before VB support in AutoCAD).

Well, there's already Worse Is Better (what RPG called viralness is an integral part of WIB).

Or we could call it "Mark's Law":

> "In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end."

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0

Link to actual content: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...

Link to hacker news discussion when this video was first posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763165

I've never looked properly into Rebol and don't want to take the time to do so now. But if any HNers know about it, I'd be really interested in seeing a couple of examples of how Rebol does code=data. Specifically, is there a mapping between how Rebol represents code symbolically and how Lisp does it?

The OP did prompt me to take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath, which is actually pretty interesting. I hadn't known about his work on operating systems and the Amiga.

Not a lot of info in the link, but http://www.rebol.com/ seems as comprehensive as the equivalents for other languages.

rebol is very nice, my last 4 web-apps are done 100% in it

Crockford should stop claiming he invented JSON.

Brendan Eich did, JSON is Javascript, part of it, its own data structure, it is javascript object notation.

What Crockford did was to spread its adoption among other languages, building libraries and encouraging people to use them.

To Caesar what is Caesar’s...

If you watch his talk he doesn't claim he invented JSON; he goes out of his way to say he discovered it -- because it was already there. And he even says that he wasn't the first to discover it either -- as many other people figured it out around the same time.

"An influence was Rebol, a shame it’s not more popular"

Then the title is misleading. Rebol as an influence to what?

We should ask that question to Brendan to see what influenced HIM to design javascript as he did.

Javascript is extremely heavily influenced by Self: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language)

JSON as an interchange format was a unique invention. It may not be a very substantial invention, but it was still a new idea.

The first thing he says is that he didn't invent JSON. He also tells who used it a year before as such. Around 8:30 he also explains why he did create a website - to create a "standard" out of it, etc..

It would be better if you watched the video before commenting this.

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