Rebol – Internet Programming Language

REBOL is a proprietary scripting computing language…messaging language that is succinct, quick to learn, and almost heroically portable.

Rebol Home Page
Rebol overview
Rebol Links
Rebol Review
Rebol Review #2

From what I can tell, Rebol seems to be
a viable language for internet programming.
However, I don’t know that I could recommend it.

1. First there is the cost.  It costs money to develop for it and server versions of the software
costs thousands of dollars
2. You would be
committing to a platform that is dependent on the viability of a small company. 
Since it isn’t open source, the future of Rebol is in the hands of the company
behind it.
3. Though their may
be a vibrant community supporting it, it is not widespread.  Trying to hire for
Rebol support unless you are willing to work remotely, could be a challenge. 

4. Compared to other
tools/technologies, the documentation, sample code and support is not
large.
5. I don’t know any
significant programs/companies that use Rebol.
6. Most of the
articles I read on the web, especially those touting it, are 4 years
old.

An example of its
"power".  You can send an email with a command similar to:

send someone@email.com "The message."

Cool, a single
line of code to send an email. But that Rebol
command ’send’ had to be written (in C I believe). That same function could have
been written in C and made available in a library and the syntax might look like this:

send("someone@email.com"The message.");

Pretty much the same
thing.  The fact it is "built-in" to the language, and makes the language "expressive", people will argue is a
wonderful thing, and it IS nice, but that argument is not sufficient to motivate me to learn a new programming paradigm..