Red Programming Language Blog

Actually, this reminds me very strongly of Rebol [0] and related languages (e.g. Red [1]). They work as you describe at the end: whenever a function is encountered, the interpreter inspects the following arguments, without any need for parentheses. Since these languages are homoiconic like Lisp, it’s possible to use functions as if they were macros (achieving it at runtime using a rather strange ‘binding’ system). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol [1] https://www.red-lang.org/

Great idea, would be nice to use this to compare different GUIs framework. Interested in c++ immediate GUIs, shadertoy.com like GUI and Red language https://www.red-lang.org/

A new REBOL like language is in the making: https://www.red-lang.org/ Definitely worth a look.

This is very interesting, I've also found about Red Lang [1] a couple of months ago, it offers a syntax very similar to Rebol and it is great if you want to create some apps with a simple GUI. [1] http://www.red-lang.org/

Indeed, Rebol was groundbreaking in so many ways. Hard for some to understand, but for those whose brains have receptors for it there is nothing quite like it. Working in other langs can be hard once you're used to Rebol, because some things seem so obvious that you can't see why other langs don't do it. I'm part of Team Red, working on Rebol's successor (https://www.red-lang.org/). We have a number of old Rebolers, but also a lot of new faces, and we're having a great time carrying the torch forward. We still have a lot of work to do, but by the end of the year we should have feature parity with R2, not to mention all the new features Red has, like a compiler, reactive system, Android support, and native GUIs.

https://www.red-lang.org wasn't created in the last year, but it hasn't hit 1.0 release yet and is continuing to mature. I would consider checking it out. I can't think of a 2018 language release with such amazing implications unless you count the brief trendiness of Nim (which first appeared over 10 years ago).

I wish Chicken Scheme could be ported to Windows without the Posix dependencies. I run it on my Linux box, but unfortunately, work is all Windows. I have had years of frustration with Cygwin and MinGW or MSYS to run such things. I use Red [1] now, which is homoiconic like Lisp, has a great parser, and runs on all platforms with an executable under 1 MB. [1] https://www.red-lang.org/

> Personally I still love Racket and think that is the LISP of the future. I agree. It seems quite likely that the next "hundred-year language" will either be racket itself, or live in racket's ecosystem. That, or something like red[0] [0](http://www.red-lang.org/)

Honestly, many apps could just as well be developed with red[0], maybe not in javascript, but with the smoothest cross-platform compilation I've ever seen. Runs in 1mb of ram, and the download size of most apps made with it won't exceed that either. It's no C for sure, but it's really amazing to have cross-platform gui-support bundled into the language itself (windows & mac is ready, android and linux are in the works) So yes, no re-use of webdev skills, but a really fun language, and immediate results - had I known about red before javascript, I would've never picked up JS. [0] http://www.red-lang.org/

I was keeping an eye on perl6 for a long time, still do, still have 3+ RSS feeds that are perl6 related. But as a 'not workhorse language that is potentially worth learning' it shares space with Red http://www.red-lang.org and it interest me more at the moment.

For me, it's - 1) Red - Small in size; Readable, compact and concise code. Its a powerful All-in-One Package with lots of great features as well as easy for newcomers. It can be used for low level as well as high level programming. http://www.red-lang.org/ 2) Rust - Its powerful concepts of borrowing and ownership, and its tight security features are just great. But its kinda verbose. 3) Nim - Clean, readable code. Fast compile times as well as compiled code. Lots of good ideas in it. Different gc's for different use cases are great.

Rebol (http://www.rebol.com) and subsequently Red (http://red-lang.org) are great languages whose purpose is to eliminate the needless complexity in software engineering. For example; one can write a Rebol parser in 10 lines of Rebol code!

You can check Rebol http://www.rebol.com/ and the new Red http://www.red-lang.org/ programming languages. The latter one not yet production ready. In Rebol (and Red) you can just do the following: print 3:30am + 00:07:19 ; increment time values properly Note that ';' is the identifier for a comment.

Rebol is a great language that I've been using for years and still am using now. It was unfortunate it wasn't open sourced soon, but in 2012, we finally saw Apache-licensed version. Carl Sassenrath (also author of AmigaOS) the disappeared from the Rebol development (he's now working on Roku) but the community took over the bug-fixing and development and the language still lives on. For the latest "community" version of Rebol, have a look at [1]. There is also Red language [2] that is heavily inspired by Rebol, but is not only interpreted and can be compiled also. [1] https://github.com/metaeducation/ren-c [2] http://www.red-lang.org

> REBOL had a lot of time to grow beyond where it seems to be now. I'm following Red development, hoping for it to become a free (in both senses) modernized REBOL: http://www.red-lang.org/ It's not there yet, obviously, but it looks promising.

Politically incorrect question for Rebol jocks: Doesn't Red (http://www.red-lang.org/) appear to have the vitality lost years ago by Rebol? Am seriously not trying to be rude to Carl Sassenrath, Rebol's inventor. Just discovered Rebol lately so am not very tuned in to the ecosystem. But Red has been open source for some time, it appears to be dramatically faster, and seems to be free of Carl's understandable urges to keep some kind of control in an anarchic world? I say this as someone trying to decide which one to invest my very limited non-work time in one of these two very worthy projects.

Rebol, is mostly "dead", and I don't like to so easily throw the term around. But, originally it started out as a proprietary commercial language, then when it couldn't make enough money, went open source. It has some good concepts, and passionate followers, but didn't go mainstream. Even though it went open source, in the flood of so many languages that exists now, continual development stalled. However, it did produce several offshoot descendant languages. Something to point out, is there is a lot of old tutorials and information on Rebol that becomes more useful as references, if a person learns any of the descendant languages. Red (https://www.red-lang.org), is a very good open source offshoot. If a person is choosing between them, I think most would recommend it. But, the problem with Red is its development can be described as sluggish. The lead developers appear overly preoccupied with other projects, as oppose to getting Red into a more useful state and delivering on the stated goals and expected features. For example, one of its main benefits is easy cross-compiling to other OSes. However, it's stuck in 32-bit, and needs to have a 64-bit version to keep pace with the requirements of macOS, iOS, and Android. If Red's development was to keep on pace, which is important for multi-OS usability, I do think it would be worth knowing. Quite powerful and easy to learn language, for potentially a wide variety of purposes, with a light footprint.

100% agree with your sentiment. Maybe it's just the case that disruption is needed every decade or two to keep things fresh and interesting. Anyone who has dipped a toe into modern frontend web development and hasn't stayed for long enough to drink the kool-aid knows that it's a shitshow. You need a toolchain a mile long just to get some basic stuff on the screen, a far cry from the easy learning curve (lol!) of Perl outputting HTML via cgi-bin in your home directory 20 years ago. Okay, sure, you have access to a lot of visually pretty things now, but ultimately a lot of that could have been implemented at the browser level by exposing primitives that were more useful right from the start, rather than downloading a few megs of Javascript to emulate a reasonable environment on top of an unreasonable one. Remember the 1.44MB QNX magical floppy disk demo? Entire OS and a Javascript-capable web browser in less space than it takes to visit the average corporate homepage now. Something is wrong here. I don't think there has to be a tradeoff where the programming languages become insanely difficult for average developers in order to use less space, either; it's not like modern JS is particularly easy. https://www.red-lang.org/ is something in the right direction. The language itself looks a little confusing still, but I love the idea of a small binary that can run it and produce decent GUIs out the other end. We need to revisit the basic assumptions and produce something that…

You just cast some light on a major misunderstanding. It's irrelevant whether would you like to take a trip or not. It's like medicine. Many of us know how it works. You should try taking it even if you don't feel the urge. Based on what you said so far, it's very likely to be effective. For example I went on a 5 weeks, inter-Europe trip in 2004 with MPlayer A'rpi when he was heart broken. All of my friends said I'm crazy to recommend such a remedy, but it worked! :) We were ~27yrs old only though... I would be delighted to talk about meaningful work with you. I see soooo many problems in the world unsolved... many just in software land. The amount of knowledge required to evoke the help of hardware of software to solve real world problems is just ridiculous and very prohibitive for people who otherwise understand the problem domain well and have probably good ideas for solutions. We will never know though whether their ideas were good solutions or not, because it's just beyond their capacity to learn all that bullshit we call "programming" nowadays. Rebol, the http://easiestprogramminglanguage.com/ showed a possible direction. A friend of mine is pursuing that direction by writing a modern incarnation http://www.red-lang.org/ He gave up his job, retreated from Paris to Montenegro and in the past 3 years he was living on donations, then just moved to Beijing recently for incubation at InnovationWorks. He is your age too...

Oh, until the URL part, I assumed you were the creator of Red [1]. I vaguely remembered reading about it a couple years ago, and thought "I don't remember it being positioned as for CLI scripts shrug". Even seeing 'rad' in the URLs, at first I thought you'd misspelt them there :) [1] https://www.red-lang.org/

It had been recently improved. It might not be on par with TCL/Tk polishing, but it can do lots of stuff. https://www.red-lang.org/ The main issue is the lack of self-bootstrapping.

Looking through the examples, macros and pattern-matching, for me that would be impressive like 10 years ago. If you want to see really innovative, readable and powerful language check out Red. While the language development seems to be ceased, the ideas (coming from old proprietary Rebol language) of working with code and data go much deeper than just macros: it has built-in DSL (called parse) for making DSLs on the fly and not just pre-runtime code manipulations. https://www.red-lang.org/ And there is XL language which might have even more powerful extensibility features, like adding types or pattern matching or asynchronous processing. Sadly I couldn't compile and try the only implementation it has, only judging by the docs explaining its ideas. https://xlr.sourceforge.io/

Q for Rye's author: Since Rye is heavily inspired by Rebol, I wonder if you had a chance to take a look at Red [1] and what are your thoughts about it. Red looks really cool and capable, but it feels so niche/obscure and has such a small community that feels unpractical to use. -- 1: https://www.red-lang.org/

Maybe not the same, but I find Red lang ( https://www.red-lang.org/), Rebol like language, somewhat similar in spirit.

There's a descendant of Rebol that is maintained: https://www.red-lang.org/

There is also red-lang, it's successor in geist: https://www.red-lang.org/

The server is alive and kicking, but there hasn't been a release of Rebol proper for over a decade now. Red (https://www.red-lang.org) is an ongoing effort at a successor language.

You probably already are aware of it but there's an effort to create an open source successor to Rebol. See the Red Programming Language site [0]. I've played around with Red and it's pretty interesting. Though rather different from Tcl. Red compiles to native code out of the box which is an advantage. Currently Red is limited to 32-bit output. When they get 64-bit working along with self-hosting compiler I think the language could become a major success. [0] https://www.red-lang.org/

There has been an open source successor to REBOL called Red[1] for years but progress seems to have been pretty sporadic. [1] https://www.red-lang.org/

Yeah, I have no idea why Rebol and Red aren't more popular. ( https://www.red-lang.org/ ) They pack such a bang for the buck it's almost embarrassing for other language/runtimes.