Keith Devens .com

REBOL is a great little language... one of the few languages that can match or (in some domains) exceed Python.

I'm not sure about the effect opening the source would have. REBOL is as compact as a monkey's-fist-knot, so I wouldn't be surprised if the design is extremely intricate. Carl probably uses home-grown tools to manage the cross-platform dependencies, and maybe he's reluctant to open this career-spanning work as well. Pure conjecture here...

For a few years now, REBOL has been wavering a few degrees from a tipping point. Again, if I had to guess, I think Carl Sassenrath knows he has good technology (despite the semantic/syntactic facade of the language). As a long-time veteran of the industry, he's appears cool about how it all plays out.

REBOL proponents see the language's prospects as inevitable, like water flowing down a hill. The non-believers substitute the hill with a drain.

I didn't mean to imply problems with REBOL's syntax-- rather I meant that REBOL is advanced technology despite the relative simplicity of the user-level programming interface.

REBOL is a great little language... it's amazing how much they fit into such little space.

Note that I didn't say "They should have open-sourced it". They have their own reasons for keeping it proprietary (like, say, making a living), and they've mentioned in the past that they may consider open-sourcing it some day, but during the language's early evolution they wanted to keep a tighter reign on it by keeping the source to themselves. I wish it was open source largely so I would have access to facilities they provide with their pro version, like making system calls and having access to databases, but primarily because I think it would gain the language wider adoption.