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The Red Programming Language

red-lang.org

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Re: The Red Programming Language

#11

Post by timbit42 »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #8
ttoinou wrote: post #7

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

it's lisp with square braces instead of parens (and then a whole bunch of other random things like a gui library in the standard library?)

It's actually more like Logo, which is Lisp with square brackets instead of parens and fixed arity.

Sassenrath wrote Amiga Logo before starting REBOL.

Re: The Red Programming Language

#12

Post by kstrauser »

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #6
kstrauser wrote: post #2

This is a successor to REBOL[0], designed by Carl Sassenrath[1] who designed the Amiga kernel. I've looked it a few times over the years. It's neat. I've never written a single line of it, though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

"In 1988, Sassenrath left Silicon Valley for the mountains of Ukiah valley, 2 hours north of San Francisco. From there he founded multimedia technology companies such as Pantaray, American Multimedia, and VideoStream. He also implemented the Logo programming language for the Amiga, managed the software OS development for CDTV, one of the first CD-ROM TV set-top boxes, and wrote the OS for Viscorp Ed, one of the first…

Right? And I think that's what keeps bringing me back to REBOL, and thus Red. They don't appeal to me on the face of them. Like, the code examples look interesting but in a "magical" kind of way that strikes a little bit of fear into my engineering heart. But with that kind of pedigree, I can't dismiss the ideas. If Sassenrath came up with it, I bet there's a kernel of awesomeness inside.

Re: The Red Programming Language

#13

Post by troupo »

7thaccount wrote: post #4
justin66 wrote: post #3

I figured they were cooked when they started doing weird cryptocurrency-related stuff. I really hope they get to their 1.0 release someday.

Same. I was regularly following it until they started talking about an ICO and began focusing too much on making a dialect for block chain stuff. The idea between having the red system language, regular scripting language, cross platform gui, and native executables was really cool though. I remember being interested back in ~2015, so my question is...what's going on as it's been a decade. I know the project is crazy…

IIRC think their original roadmap had 1.0 around 2020. And that was going to include everything, including async written from scratch in a language where nothing was made for async.

Then the roadmap slipped, and then never mentioned again.

But I haven't looked at the language or discussions around it for a long while now.

Edit: found some old discussion here. In 2018 they were at version 0.6.4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18864840

In 2025 they are at version 0.6.6: https://github.com/red/red/releases

Re: The Red Programming Language

#16

Post by kbelder »

kstrauser wrote: post #2

This is a successor to REBOL[0], designed by Carl Sassenrath[1] who designed the Amiga kernel. I've looked it a few times over the years. It's neat. I've never written a single line of it, though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

I used it once to build a simple web scraper and image downloader, and it worked really great for that. It was right in the wheelhouse for the language. (That was REBOL, not RED, and many years ago.) Honestly I'd just do it in Python, now, even though it's not as interesting.

Re: The Red Programming Language

#18

Post by gt0 »

kstrauser wrote: post #2

This is a successor to REBOL[0], designed by Carl Sassenrath[1] who designed the Amiga kernel. I've looked it a few times over the years. It's neat. I've never written a single line of it, though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

I wrote a small app in REBOL once, just too automate some stuff for some managers in a job about 20 years ago. It's quite nice, but I don't think I'd want to write anything significant with it.

Re: The Red Programming Language

#19

Post by dmitrygr »

ttoinou wrote: post #7

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

>This is like the only programming language I could never learn.

Wait till you hear of Urbit and see this: https://developers.urbit.org/overview/nock

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