Rebol Programming/Design Guide/Forget the Past

This is perhaps the most important single piece of advice when learning Rebol for the first time: forget the past. Forget what you already know about programming.

Rebol is different. If you know other programming languages such as C or BASIC, and you expect to program Rebol the same way, then what you will get as a result is C or BASIC. Nothing better. We've seen this happen many times.

When programmers finally "get" Rebol, they often make this comment: "You should have told me to forget what I know about programming, I would have been better off."

Does that mean Rebol is difficult to learn? No it's not. But, it's different in many ways, and it makes you think differently about how to program... that is, if you want to program well. Rebol's powerful concept of "dialecting" is just one example.

Here's another way to look at Rebol: If you compare the way you code in assembly language to the way you write in higher level languages, your approach is quite different. This same amplification factor is true with Rebol when compared to most higher level languages.