Languages that encourage making DSLs are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, you get to make a language that is more clear and fine-tuned to your use-case. On the other, you have an ad-hoc language with no support that you have to maintain along with the documentation (considering that you can't expect anyone else to know the DSL ahead of time). As I've gotten older, I've determined that well-designed APIs in a well-known language are a better alternative to DSLs.
This is a successor to REBOL[0], designed by Carl Sassenrath[1] who designed the Amiga kernel.<p>I've looked it a few times over the years. It's neat. I've never written a single line of it, though.<p>[0]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol</a><p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath</a>
Here [0] is an example of what it looks like. Took some digging to find, really should be more prominent on the site.<p>It's very elegant! I can't fully grasp everything that's happening but the visual appearance of the syntax alone is interesting.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/red/code/blob/master/Scripts/clock.red">https://github.com/red/code/blob/master/Scripts/clock.red</a>
I have tried Rebol out a little, multiple times over the years. it's a cool language. I like it.<p>I also got to know about Red early, followed it and tried it out for a bit.<p>but as others have said, that move to crypto, to fund the dev work and make the devs money, put me off for good. nothing wrong with making money, let them make plenty, I just didn't jive with crypto as a way of doing it.<p>sad about it going that route
This is like the only programming language I could never learn. I just don't understand anything and I can't build any mental model of what's going on behind the hood
When I look at a programming language site, especially for a "new" language, I want a quick way to navigate to a reasonably sized decent code sample, ideally documented, showing off significant language features, idiomatic syntax and usage patterns etc...<p>Sites which do this well (just from the top of my head):<p><pre><code> https://odin-lang.org/
immediate code sample visible
"See the Full Demo"
"See More Examples"
https://ziglang.org/
immediate code sample
scroll down a bit, "More Code Samples"
</code></pre>
Here on red-lang.org... I can barely find a consecutive meaningful chunk of code... ?<p><pre><code> "Getting Started" Nope
"Documentation" Nope
"Official Documentation" link to github
https://github.com/red/docs/blob/master/en/SUMMARY.adoc
"Home"
merely a chronologically sorted blog
newest entry links to 50 line "script" by chance
showing off multi-monitor support
(doesn't seem like a super helpful sample)
?</code></pre>
ah, this is not about the Red Language that Intermetrics designed in 1977-79 to satisfy the Steelman requirements of the DoD's High Order Language Working Group... (the Green Language won and became known as Ada).<p>I thought maybe someone had put the DoD's Red language spec online.<p>And yes, someone has:
<a href="https://iment.com/maida/computer/redref/" rel="nofollow">https://iment.com/maida/computer/redref/</a>
Maybe it's just bias based on what I'm familiar with but I don't really like the syntax, or at least I can't understand any of it intuitively. Looking at the few examples I can find, it doesn't appear to be obvious without having to look at and interpret a bunch of surrounding context for clues to what a particular token is, e.g. a function name, a variable, an argument to a function and what function it is an argument to, the type of a variable, a value being assigned to it, etc. I see a lot of lines of code that are just several strings in a row without any sort of punctuation.
So, REBOL and Red are basically Fexpr-based Lisps, right? They never describe themselves this way (instead using terms like definitional scoping, etc.), but it all just seems like a non-rigorous Fexpr based Lisp (almost like a light-weight version of vau-calculus of Kernel).
<p><pre><code> red-lang.org is blocked!
Phantom believes this website is malicious and unsafe to use.
This site has been flagged as part of a community-maintained database of known phishing websites and scams. If you believe the site has been flagged in error, please file an issue.
Ignore this warning, take me to https://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html anyway.</code></pre>
> Red’s ambitious goal is to build the world’s first full-stack language, a language you can use from system programming tasks, up to high-level scripting through DSL.<p>Pretty nonsensical statement. We have that for 50 years. Common Lisp, for example.
The website looks like 2013 and much of the content is as well. There's a GitHub repo that I couldn't find from the website: <a href="https://github.com/red/red">https://github.com/red/red</a>
I cant find some stuff from the docs. What i am wondering is:<p>For 'platforms' it notes for x86_64, "linux" and other operating systems.<p>is there a compiler option for this thing to make it spit out a 'freestanding' binary for the architectures it supports?
red was terrible in 2018, and its terrible now - just tried to compile hello world and it takes 36 seconds<p><a href="https://github.com/red/red/issues/5615">https://github.com/red/red/issues/5615</a>