what's wrong with REBOL?

[Jeff Epler]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 09:03:17PM +0000, Christopher Browne wrote:
> "What's wrong" is that 'proprietary nature.'  If I write code in Perl,
> Python, or Ruby, I can be certain that I won't get bitten because of
> someone pulling the rug out from under them.  
> 
> I can't be certain in the same way of the perpetual availability of
> REBOL.

Of course, it's also possible that it might become impossible to use
"non-proprietary" software.

There are legal reasons: Perhaps the software will be found to violate
a patent, or infringe copyright.  Perhaps it will be judged to violate a
DMCA-type law.  Perhaps a new "software defects" law will be impossible
for free software to conform to (for instance, due to a requirement that
the software developer post a bond against damages caused by defects in
the software).

There are also technical reasons:  How many programmer-hours do you think
it would take to port X10 (the predecessor to X11) to MacOS X running
on Itanium?  Or to XBox2?  What if the dominant machine/OS combination in
the future makes it hard or impossible to run programs written in your
chosen language (JVM doesn't support C efficiently, for instance), or
uses DRM to keep you from running arbitrary unsigned code (under a system
of this type, interpreters like Python would obvously never be Signed)

Jeff