Red is awesome. Why it's not hip it's a mystery to me...
It doesn't even have GC yet.
I guess I’ll try asking this again: How come Red doesn’t have a GC? If Red doesn’t have free, does it just leak memory?
Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
81–90 of 117 posts
Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks nice: agreed. Feels nice? Try running an Electron app (for example atom or VS code) on a 4gb ram celeron (like the one I have at my 9-5 work) and I can guarantee that you won't like the feeling :/
A lot of people care about looks and ergonomics before performance. I am not one of them but seriously people like shiny things. Even tech users like good UI before having to use your traditional shitty gui but performant app.
Not this tech user and not tech team either. I value my time and a shiny slow UI and often even a good slow UI does not help me with that. My go to tooling to 'get shit done' with my team looks awful and is extremely condensed (one of the forms is one of our 45 page apps condensed into one page) but it is far faster to work with than anything like the shiny things we ship. Both are fast but the none shiny versions are much faster (in everything) because they use less resources, no images etc, so that saves time too when you are working and quickly need to check some flow. Also on slow computers.
I agree a lot of people care about looks and ergonomics, but none tech people complain about Electron apps: a lot of people know the standard things on Windows and these apps behave and look different. For young people this might not matter, but 40+ none technical friends ask me for help a lot with these none standard things where there is no normal menu or preferences is in a different place etc. I tell them to think of it like a webpage and not a Windows app. But it is a Windows app...
It is probably too late to turn things around, but I hope people keep trying. I will anyway. And these kind of articles (and Rebol) give me some hope.
Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't even have GC yet.
I guess I’ll try asking this again: How come Red doesn’t have a GC? If Red doesn’t have free, does it just leak memory?
Yes. Last I checked, it just leaks memory. It doesn't have GC because it's a new language that is under heavy development. It doesn't have a lot of things that any sane language must have before 1.0. Give it time.
Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
#84Earlier 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…
Every word (the thing what author calls a "variable") has a binding. In short, it's a pointer to the namespace where value associated with that word resides.
Blocks can nest any other value, including words. At any point in runtime you can change this pointers (bound word to some value) for every word in a block or for separate words.
Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
#85I tried installing the Windows version of Red but Avira blocked it as a trojan (TR/Crypt.XPACK.Gen2). Any thoughts? Edit: I found this https://github.com/red/red/issues/2399
Yes, Avira, Avast (and recently Norton) give us a ton of headaches because of their bad heuristics.
Just to show you how they don't really care, here's a tweet discussion with Avira (dated July):
Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
#86For 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.
It might get hairy if DSL is non-trivial, IIRC Doc has plans to implement meta-DSL wrapper (a la Rascal) sometime after 1.0 launch to ease the process.
Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the success of Electron apps (i.e. Slack), I am starting to think this level of OS/GUI Fidelity isn't all that important. As long as the application is attractive and does the job, people don't seem to care that much about it matching the OS look and feel.
This is a very common misconception these days, IMHO. "Because people just use best of what's available, I presume that they are actually content with what they have." Today another thread talking about web apps and the heaviness thereof, people suggest that given people use these apps/websites, they must really prefer these slow, messy and creepy things to plain, information-dense sources. This might be indeed true,…
instead of "best", I'd say people use what's good enough. electron is good enough for most people, and some people do notice the high resource usage, but they are in the minority, as most users don't attribute sluggishness of the machine on the app that's not slow (and electron can be made to feel fast if you know what you're doing).
Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't even have GC yet.
I guess I’ll try asking this again: How come Red doesn’t have a GC? If Red doesn’t have free, does it just leak memory?
First version of GC (and maybe some memory-management natives) will be integrated in 0.6.4 release, meanwhile there's some bag of tricks and conventions (`/into` refinement, creating series with `make ...`, etc) you can use to avoid additional allocations (almost) entirely.
Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very common misconception these days, IMHO. "Because people just use best of what's available, I presume that they are actually content with what they have." Today another thread talking about web apps and the heaviness thereof, people suggest that given people use these apps/websites, they must really prefer these slow, messy and creepy things to plain, information-dense sources. This might be indeed true,…
instead of "best", I'd say people use what's good enough. electron is good enough for most people, and some people do notice the high resource usage, but they are in the minority, as most users don't attribute sluggishness of the machine on the app that's not slow (and electron can be made to feel fast if you know what you're doing).
Electron is not "good enough for people" because people don't know about it, or, to put it better, are not supposed to know about it. It's an implementation detail.
> sluggishness of the machine
So say a machine with 4GB ram and a decent 4-core CPU around 1.8 GHz is sluggish? Let's honestly say "we're sacrificing resources on the client side for ease of development on ours".
Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also atrocious looking and alien feeling on every system.
Are you recalling the 1990s, or contemporary Tcl/Tk [0][1]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tk-Demo_using_Tk_8.6.6_on... [1] http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/idle.html
quite frankly, the two screenshots you posted are atrocious and a good reason to show people why one wouldn't use TCL/Tk