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Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

wesleyhill.co.uk

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Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#101

Post by throwaway7645 »

vram22 wrote: post #95
throwaway7645 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to describe the beginner experience with FPC (nice acronym) + Lazarus and Rebol. Rebol has a lot of sites showing you how to build simple GUIs fast although some things are getting old (had trouble getting the native email functionality to work). So more beginner friendly doc would help both projects a lot. Also, I think it would help pointing out that certain things like connecting to an Oracle db are easy in C…

Got it, thanks. Yes, there can be such issues, with any project, but to some extent or in some cases, more with open source projects, particularly those without funding or good management - though of course closed source projects are not immune to such issues either.

Agreed!

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#102

Post by 9214 »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #99
9214 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you can start with [1] and ask people in community, there may be a couple of simple examples to show. [1]: https://github.com/red/red/wiki/Red---Rebol-Dialects:--Selec...

I've tried asking the community before and the response wasn't good. With that being said, the links you sent were pretty nice, so thank you!

You're welcome! I actually rather interested in DSL creation myself and want to dabble my feet in this topic sometime. And I also feel that creation of dialects is rather obscure art for old-timers, and that there's a need for learning material.

With that said, I would appreciate if you'd listed what would you like to see in "How to bake DSL with Parse" guide of some sort, that would be really helpful when the time will come for writing tutorials and documentation.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#104

Post by onetom »

garyclarke27 wrote: post #4

Iniatly I was excited by Red’s expressiveness, ease of use and cross platform capability, but was very disappointed to find it lacks a driver for PostgreSQL. This for me is critical and surprising omission, especially considering that the main developer of Red - Nenad Rakocevic - wrote a Postgres driver for Rebol??

In the past, when I was writing web scrapers and I wanted to put the results into a database, I was just using the command-line interface for the database via the Rebol `CALL` function. It was a couple of lines to create a `SELECT` and `INSERT` function to abstract this detail away... If you are really curious about Red, you should give this approach a try and in case it's not performant enough for you, then you can put this option on hold until Red has proper I/O support.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#105

Post by greggirwin »

shalabhc wrote: post #67
9214 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify: - unevaluated expressions are called blocks, and with them the line between code and data blurs, since you can treat block as either one at any time (homoiconity); - there're no scopes, only namespaces (contexts); - yes, Parse is one of the Red's crown jewels, many people (and author of the article himself) treat it as some kind of "plain English regex", while in fact it's not limited only to string parsi…

Thanks for the clarifications. > it's not limited only to string parsing, but can be applied to any other series-like value and code (i.e. blocks) itself Sounds somewhat similar to OMeta ( http://www.tinlizzie.org/ometa/ ) which can pattern match streams of objects. With contexts it sounds like almost every word can be late bound? Also it seems blocks and contexts are decoupled which means you could evaluate multiple…

You can pattern match streams of values, and those values can be any lexical form that Red supports.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#106

Post by greggirwin »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #76
shalabhc wrote: post #49

For language enthusiasts, here are some interesting features of Red (and Rebol): - You can pass unevaluated expressions to functions, which can then choose to evaluate the expressions any way they want. This sounds similar to 'fexprs' in some lisps. - Scoping is very 'flexible' - you can take a function body and evaluate it in another 'context' which provides different values for all the words in the body. - Making m…

I'm not sure how easy it is to do DSLs. You don't see this popup in the Red or Rebol docs for a reason. It is homoiconic like Lisp, so it should be feasible. I'd love to hear some of the core devs like doc respond.

How hard it is all depends on the DSL. I just found another article on HN and whipped one up as an example. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16010971

It's not black magic, by any means, but it's also not yet point and click. We'll build more tools, higher level pieces, and more in the future.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#107

Post by greggirwin »

FreakyT wrote: post #51

I don't see any reason why this would avoid the issue with every cross platform GUI toolkit: missing nuances that make apps written with it seem strange and foreign to each platform, even if superficially the appearance is correct. Minor things, like common layouts, keyboard shortcuts, or just ways of doing things in general ("get info..." vs "properties" comes to mind) are a few of what cross platform toolkits never…

You can see how Red is starting to approach this in http://www.red-lang.org/2017/07/063-macos-gui-backend.html, particularly the Cross Platform GUI Metrics section. It is a really hard problem. Technically it can be done, if you put all the onus on the user. The more we try to do for them, the harder it gets. It will always be a balance.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#108

Post by greggirwin »

greggirwin wrote: post #107
FreakyT wrote: post #51

I don't see any reason why this would avoid the issue with every cross platform GUI toolkit: missing nuances that make apps written with it seem strange and foreign to each platform, even if superficially the appearance is correct. Minor things, like common layouts, keyboard shortcuts, or just ways of doing things in general ("get info..." vs "properties" comes to mind) are a few of what cross platform toolkits never…

You can see how Red is starting to approach this in http://www.red-lang.org/2017/07/063-macos-gui-backend.html , particularly the Cross Platform GUI Metrics section. It is a really hard problem. Technically it can be done, if you put all the onus on the user. The more we try to do for them, the harder it gets. It will always be a balance.

Ah, I see @rebolek noted that as well. He always beats me.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#109

Post by greggirwin »

mzzter wrote: post #75
rebolek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C has alloc and free. Red is supposed to be garbage collected, so there's no free.

How come Red doesn’t have a GC then? If Red doesn’t have free, does it just leak memory?

GC will come. It just hasn't been needed yet for Red to continue its own development. If you write in Red/System, the C level dialect, you have `free`.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#110

Post by greggirwin »

badsectoracula wrote: post #62
MR4D wrote: post #2

I always wondered why there has been no real successor to VB. This looks promising!

The thing is, a real successor to VB wont be a programming language because VB's strength wasn't the programming language part (if anything, it was one of the weaker parts) but the ridiculously simple GUI designer and COM/ActiveX that allowed people to compose applications out of reusable components (be it controls or just pieces of code). We don't have a real successor to VB (yet) because people always tend to overl…

Wish I could give this comment +10.
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