Cipri, I respect what you are doing with the PDF viewer. But go and have a look on Haikuware and view the new apps over, say, the last 180 days.
http://haikuware.com/repository-stats
Now isn’t that a depressing sight? Ported command-line compression apps which were already available. Dog-slow hobbyist apps written in yab (some of those would be mine). In fact, your Document Viewer is the ONLY major new app to show up there in the last 6 months IMHO. And let’s face it, a hundred downloads? Is that really how small our community is?
Haiku itself may have made progress, although most of it it is under the hood. (Fire up Alpha 1 and alpha 3 and ask a newcomer to tell the difference!). But in terms of apps, we are standing still. In fact, we are moving backwards. More and more old BeOS apps that ran fine under A1 no longer work. Which is OK, except that they are not being replaced or updated.
I may be the only one to see this as a problem. But I cannot honestly tell my friends to install Haiku if they want to do anything except play around with Haiku. It’s been 10 years. It is not unreasonable to start asking “Yes, but what can we DO with it?” If we have any intention of expanding beyond those 100 people, we need an answer to that question.
2-3 years ago QT was supposed to be the promised land of new Haiku apps. That fizzled out quickly.
No, rebol scripts by themselves are not likely to solve this problem. Porting the API to Python and Lua will not, by itself, solve the problem. But every little bit helps. Every new possibility of writing apps makes Haiku attractive to a different set of enthusiasts.