Rebol reminds me a lot of Tcl/Tk, but I can’t tell if that is because there’s a dialect that resembles it, or that it takes inspiration from tcl’s command substitution.

Tcl's command substitution is entirely string based, Rebol loads source and everything happens with internal values. That's a big difference.

Let me see if I understand this. By loading source / internal values, do you mean that the Rebol command substitution works with the AST directly?

One of the reasons it's not so famous is that it's had various historical struggles, including being stuck at 32-bit for a long time IIRC (I'm hazy on the details and corrections welcome). I love it though.

Also they went of down a cryptocurrency path for a while, not sure where that's at but it certainly seemed like a big distraction from finishing the main thing.

REBOL remained commercial closed source for a long time when the languages it was competing with were open source.

Rebol3 in open source and there's a very active fork https://github.com/oldes/Rebol3

I have spent an entire day last week studying Rebol and was not able to find an active enough fork. The language has great ideas but by God, are they terrible at just letting their presence known, both the original product and this fork.

Call it the Rebol curse, I guess.

All I could find were 32-bit binaries on a couple sites compiled a decade ago, and a lot of focus on Red, which is in a weird limbo as well.

Red seems to have similar challenges. They have their code on GitHub, but the Releases are confusing. They have 3 releases posted. The latest one is 5 years old. But the project is active. You can download from their site, but the version number isn’t obvious.

From poking at the project, it looks interesting but not ready to really try out yet.

https://github.com/red/red/releases

That is probably what I hate the most about today's technology.

"compiled a decade ago"

Listen here, kid. Two and a half decades ago I had Windows 95 and I could browse the Web, send and receive email (or fax!), play music, play videos (or movies), play games, use instant messaging, program in multiple languages, use databases, run a mail or Web server on my desktop, read and edit documents in formats such as doc, rtf, xls, ppt, pdf, xml, desktop publishing, view and edit images including high re photos, including porn of course, make international phone calls, and a few other things.

And every single Tcl/Tk script (cli or gui) I wrote two decades ago still run 100% unchanged.

If you refrain from using anything just because it was "compiled a decade ago" then you are a fool. Sadly, you are not alone. Far from it.

a lot has happened in the last 10 years. and while the binary may still be good, it being that old suggests that it is no longer maintained, and in particular hasn't received any security updates. that doesn't mean that a recent binary is necessarily better, but it is at least more likely to be better.

Weird take but ok. I abandoned my research into Rebol to look into Self (1987) and Smalltalk (1972).

The problem with abandonware languages like Rebol is that it's often impossible to use, find documentation for if not learn, and the commercial story and lack of any sense of open source of this probect is the reason why I just moved on. It seemed no one cared to look into it in the past decade, so I was content with what I had found, and stopped short of actually using the thing. I was wrong, but in my defence the active fork was doing its best to hide under a rock.

But I guess it feels good to call someone a kid and a fool over the Internet.

Seems like the development is much more focussed since last year and a lot is happening with 1.0 (and 64-bit support) being on the way possibly by the end of this year. [1][2]

I am really looking forward to learn more about this language when 1.0 comes out, especially because of its ambitious feature list [3] (programming across the low/high-level spectrum, etc.), Lisp influences and the Logo-like syntax inherited from Rebol.

- [1] https://www.red-lang.org/2022/07/the-road-to-10.html - [2] https://www.red-lang.org/p/roadmap_2.html - [3] https://github.com/red/red

These one liners are fascinating! Why can't we have nice things like this? http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html

> 2 - Open a GUI, read web page, send it as email:

  view layout [u: field "[email protected]" h: field "http://" btn "Send" [send to-email u/text read to-url h/text alert "Sent"]]

These one liners are fascinating! Why can't we have nice things like this? http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html

2 - Open a GUI, read web page, send it as email:

view layout [u: field "[email protected]" h: field "http://" btn "Send" [send to-email u/text read to-url h/text alert "Sent"]]

The creator, Carl Sassenrath, also wrote the pre-emptive multi-tasking Amiga OS. He was a fan of Lisp and Logo and wrote Amiga Logo after he left Commodore. Rebol is based on Logo and Lisp.