Depends on what you want to do with it. If you're looking to develop mobile or desktop applications it's almost useless. The desktop GUI is stuck in the 80s and as far as I know even that isn't an option for mobile.

If you're doing web apps, it's probably worth a try provided you don't mind writing your own libraries for a lot of stuff.

> The desktop GUI is stuck in the 80s and as far as I know even that isn't an option for mobile.

It's a shame that REBOL was open sourced a decade and a half too late. Back when Perl was still king of scripting languages and Python/Ruby etc. hadn't taken over for Perl yet, REBOL could have had success. The community was fun and creative and the implementation seemed like it would be small and able to be improved through open source.

Just checked, and the repository hasn't had a checkin for 7 months:

https://github.com/rebol/rebol

I believe REBOL and Red shouldn't be confused. The Red project seems to be going on quite lively, with the most recent commit some 9 days ago at the time I'm writing this (see https://github.com/red/red ). That said, it's still not fully complete, but it does most certainly have more modern goals than REBOL -- see e.g. the Roadmap Status page (http://www.red-lang.org/p/roadmap.html) for information about Android bridge (currently reported "90% complete", look for it at the bottom of the page).

Thankfully R3-GUI as dragged the Rebol desktop out of the 80's :)

And there are alpha versions that run on Android - http://rebol.informe.com/blog/2013/04/15/rebol-3-on-android/

But yes still got some way to go. Good news is that there are versions for Windows & Linux - http://atronixengineering.com/downloads.html

I was intrigued by the fact that it's inspired by Self, Lisp and Forth. It seems like a weird mixture of languages all of which are generally considered well designed.

Well, it's better than watching a movie instead, but not much.

Depends on the movie.

The stuff from Jim Jarmusch is rather nice.

Rebol is dead. The closed source is not maintained and was released as abandonware.

A few people have tried to keep it going, there is even a version for Android, but there have been no commits for over a year.

Huh?

Rebol 3 ("alpha version") is open-sourced under Apache 2.0 license; most recent commit is dated Mar 04 2014; not quite yesterday, but certainly not "over a year ago". See:

https://github.com/rebol/rebol

As to Red, it is a totally separate project, kinda rewrite from scratch of Rebol (started when Rebol 3 was still closed source and seemed dead), and although still not complete, looks very lively:

https://github.com/red/red

-- see also the pretty status/completion tracking graphs for Red at:

http://www.red-lang.org/p/roadmap.html

Not dead but development as become fragmented.

The main Rebol repo (https://github.com/rebol/rebol) keeps getting blocked due to a lack of stewardship :(

At some point this will be fixed. As a stop gap Rebolsources was created and was used by community to filter changes through to main repo. See https://github.com/rebolsource/r3 & http://rebolsource.net/

There are two other versions maintained by two commercial entities:

* Saphiron - http://development.saphirion.com/

* Atronix Engineering - http://atronixengineering.com/

Both are fixing/improving Rebol 3 whilst also developing the R3-GUI (Saphiron work on Windows version while Atronix ported it to Linux desktop).

Unfortunately the Saphiron development isn't kept public so the repo (https://github.com/saphirion/saphir) isn't up-to-date. Atronix is probably the best place to look at this moment (https://github.com/zsx/r3). The last commit was only 6 days ago.

Oh. Well, that's 4" of shelf space I can free up then.