This is not meant to be a technical dissertation, but more of a common sense approach. more along the line of show me what’s in for me if I invest time to learn the language ?

I have spent some months to read, learn about rebol. I have gone through all their docs and related sites on Rebol.

I have got to a point where I have come to the conclusion that Rebol is not worth investing my time in.

Reasons for me dropping REBOL.

1) It is not a language that will put food on your table. No one is really using it out there i.e no job offers Why would people spend time on something that won’t get them any job?

2) It is not used by any major enterprise for their main apps.

3) It is a one man show. everything is about the guy who invented the amiga os. that’s how they are positioning the language. What happens once that man disappears ?
Guess i am too young to know about the amiga os, and besides who cares about the amiga os today ? sounds more like a dinosaur to people of my generation.

4) The world has moved on to truly open or free or open source language or products or model. That’s the expectations today.

5) The language is not free. For example its free core or view don’t allow someone to write a basic application with database access, which is what most business apps do today. You need to buy the sdk or command to be able to do so.

Plus there is not much support for a lot of databases as well, except through the odbc module which is not availble with the free download package.

6) the community is very hostile. ( Some time back , on the rebol.com blog,I saw like a group of rebolers ganging against one poor guy , who had the misfortune of making comments why their “try rebol” attempt a la “try ruby” won’t be as successful as the ruby one and the reasons for that. They seemed to have censored his posting. I don’t see it any more there.

If you happened to be that poor guy, and you are reading this blog, please get in touch. I would like to hear from you.

7) It doesn’t have multi threading for a language that is over 10 years old

8 Its gui (view module) is so not today. It’s more like the old gui used by DOS many years ago and they don’t even have a “combo box” after 10 years of existence.

9) If after over 10 years of existence, it’s not visible at all on the TIOBE index, that’s not a good sign
(Let me add that the Tiobe index, although not 100% accurate, nevertheless reflects quite well whether a language is popular or not) You can also google and see what comes back.

10) There is almost no good IDE available for it today after so many years.

11) The code gives the impression that it is not very readable once your programs get to a substantial size.

12) I don’t see this language becoming mainstream even if you give it 10 more years. Let’s wait and see. Only time will confirm whether this prediction is true or not.

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Update 26th Oct 2009:
I am not accepting any comment (favourable or unfavourable) after those I took in during the first few days. There are just too many of them.

Thanks to all of you for your comments. 68% of the remaining unapproved comments agree with me. about 24% disagree, 6% are neutral. about 1% has asked me to look at languages like FAN, CLOJURE, O Caml . I may try these much later on if I have time.

This blog was ONLY meant for me to express my views on the extra programming languages I am looking into, not for debating every posting I make. I don’t have the time for that. I am too busy investigating another language which I’ve just picked.

Good luck to you all with whatever language you’ve chosen to work with.

UPDATE 3rd september 2011:-
Looks like what I wrote 2 years ago has been proven correct, I checked the site recently and saw no activity to the language. just a couple of extra comments in the blog. and rebol 3 which they have been talking about is not out also. So I was right. Once the founder disappears, the language disappears. Good thing I did not stick around, it would have wasted 2 years of my life.