Rebol's future

Why Rebol was never open-sourced I will never know. I guess Carl came from a different time and the non-Unix/non-academic world where software tools were sold at a high price.<p>Rebol has so many interesting ideas in it that it really could have carved a respectable niche in the world of networked programming languages. Just having sensible pragmatic built-in types for email and money was enough to bring it to my attention.<p>It's is a very odd but amazingly powerful little language worthy of study by anyone interested in language design. It has been a big influence on me even if I have never used it for anything 'real'.

If Carl had the presence of mind back in 1998 and open sourced enough of the Rebol eco system to be useful for web platform development, then /index.r rather than /index.php might have been one of the most popular default documents in the world.<p>As an aside, you can tell how interested (or not) Carl is in the future of Rebol by the fact that he's clearly not reading and responding to comments in that blog post. Otherwise he'd have cleaned up the spam comments that have been posted there days ago.

Carl Sassenrath is the designer of the original AmigaOS. Respect!

I found this in the comments to the blog post - Topaz, a REBOL inspired (but not compatible) language which compiles to javascript[1]. I found it worthy of it's own submission[2] with more info.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/topaz/try-topaz.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/topaz/try-topaz.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4492952" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4492952</a>

Carl probably shouldn't write blog posts drunk.

Non open source language and no huge company shoving it down people's throats (like MS/VB): people won't care. At best it will be a niche like Rebol.