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REBOL and Red are so so cool. I wonder why hackers are not embracing them.

Rebol was closed source back when open source was really starting to take off with Perl and Linux. It is seriously cool (I agree), but the interpreter is a little slow.

Red still has a little ways to go, but could be a game changer some day. The project is insanely ambitious, but I'm optimistic.

The main (IMO sad) reason REBOL sits in a weird half-life position of "not quite dead, but..." is that, while REBOL Core is open, the GUI parts (which are crossplatform, and run on Linux) are still closed source.

It's a bit like .NET Core. Great to base a business on... not so great to tinker around with. Arguably the second (tinkering, learning) comes before the first (using what you've learned to build a business).

Mildly infuriating...

Just to clarify it's Rebol 2 (Core/etc) that is closed source.

Rebol 3 is open-sourced along with the GUI (R3-GUI)....

* https://github.com/rebol/rebol

* https://github.com/metaeducation/ren-c (community fork)

* https://github.com/zsx/r3-gui (Atronix fork)

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