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Comment by superdisk | Hacker News Reader

This language just looks super cool. It's a shame it's sort of dead. Red (the spiritual successor) isn't ready for production yet.

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It's been really active; you can hop on their gitter and get a feel for where development is at (the sorts of things that are getting attention). I wouldn't use it for a production load, but it's ready enough for writing internal or personal tooling in.

(And edit to say, I think some of the core team got pretty far into the blockchain rabbit hole at some point, so that may have derailed more mainstream efforts)

Red died the minute they announced they were going to launch their own crypto currency.

That's a rather bold claim. What you call cryptocurrency is an ERC-20 token intended for experimenting with community economy (e.g. tipping contributors, voting for features, app market, etc). It's an untrodden path and the idea is quite interesting in its own way.

Regardless of the blockchain involvement, I encourage everyone to stay open-minded and judge the project on its technical merits.

So the cryptocurrency stuff isn't at all part of the language or stdlib?

What makes you think it is? There are plans to offer a lightweight console module for the Ethereum scheme and C3 dialect, but since there's very little interest in this branch of development from the community (and a lot of skepticism with nay-saying) it's not a priority.

I don't think it is, I (and I assume many developers) just want to stay far away from anything cryptocurrency-related.

It believe it had a restrictive license which was a showstopper for a programming language. The current version is Apache(?), but it might be too late.

Rebol2 was closed source, and is no longer maintained. Red has a non-restrictive license.

Low number of users doesn't mean dead. A Rebol 3 version now compiles to wasm. You can check the interpreter running in a browser at hostilefork.com/media/shared/replpad-js/

Red is pretty awesome. Last I tried it out, it was not ready for graphics work on Linux.

GTK backend is in a fairly good state, albeit lives in a separate development branch (which you are encouraged to check out).