Since I spent a lot of time with Syllable I can tell you more about it.
Fact is, Syllable is as good as dead. The main problem is, that Kaj, who is not able to write c++ code, was taken the leader-ship of Syllable, or at least he behaves like that. He wanted that syllables goes the way he likes, but since he is not able to write decent c++ code he could not implement anything, and he was thinking that he can give commands to the “real developers” like Arno, Rick, Jonas,Dee to implement his wishes. But of course they didn’t want to go the way of Kaj, because Kay wanted to see Rebol deeply integrated into syllable, they others didnt want, because rebol is not open source and because the release of rebol 3 was delayed a lot. That was about 3 or 4 years ago. And today Rebol 3 is still in alpha state!!
Since Vanders (the real project leader) was quite weak at that time, he was writing nearly no code all the time, has let Kaj to take more and more control about Syllable, and Kaj started to feel like a king, and didnt accept anything but his ideeas. He was claimed that syllable is a meritocracy and not a democracy, and so he said it is his right to take all the decissions since a certain statistics says that he was the most active person working for the project. Indeed the statistics was right, but he was on the top, because others were doing the work and he (kaj) was just merging-in the patches of the other developers. So most of the developers suddenly started to leave the project, or just not be active members anymore, they started to be quiet. And let Kay and Vanders alone. The result was, that nearly no progress was made.
Now many years ago, Vanders is stick “burned out”, and he doesn’t contribute nearly no code since many years, and Kaj is not able to write c++ code, just Anthony used to fix some bugs, but his activity is also quite low. Kaj killed syllable, by not giving them the freedom to develop syllable in the direction that most developers wanted. He behaved like a dictator and so he was left alone. The result can be seen simply: Look in the changelog of the last 3 yearsand you will see how empty it is, most of it is just bla bla like: Adding a boot option, translated a word, changed icons… and so on, adding wallpapers.
In fact Syllable started to die when Kaj released Syllable server, which wad nothing to do with Syllable, it was just a Linux distribution. And today it’s the same, it’s just a linux distribution. Kaj surprized us all with it, but just Vanders liked the idea, all other developers didn’t like the idea, but Kaj continued with it.
Now if you look at the homepage of Syllable nearly everything you see there are news about “conferences”, a few conferences every year. This is the contribution of Kaj. Perhaps he feels boring, or he wants to feel important and then he organizes a conference. How knows, perhaps it’s indeed benefical for his ego, but I don’t understand how he can go and present syllable so many times at conferences, and without coming with new improvements. He is not ashamed?
For Syllable it is very hard to write to write more advanced applications based on the syllable api, because its api is very poor and full of bugs, Haiku is imcomparabel more advanced.
I remember how Kaj reacted when Alpha1 of Haiku was released, he said something like: I tried haiku, and what i like about it, is the boot logo/screen.
If I’m not wrong, the latest “development-build” of syllable is more than 1 year old, in contrast, Haiku brings about every-day a few development-build (nightly), (look at haiku-files.org)
Syllable even doesn’t have a bug-tracker!!!
Today every little open-source project has a bug-tracker, syllable doesn’t!!!
What Kaj can give you, are just dreams/illusions of how great Syllable will be in future. Nothing more.Syllable is clinically dead, but kaj holds it alive, because he can not accept that he spent to many years (10 years) of his life for nothing.