
Red Programming Language 0.5.4 released - 0x1997
http://www.red-lang.org/2015/06/054-new-datatypes-exceptions-and-set.html
======
rajadigopula
Just when the world is getting ready for IOT. Might have the potential to
become the Javascript for IOT devices for it's low footprint and highly
embeddable nature.

------
Immortalin
Red could potentially become a really good platform for popularizing lisp
since it's cross-platform, have a logo-like syntax and is compiled fully to
machine code. Someone should write a Go to Red transpiler as it would be a
really a good way to increase the amount of libraries Red currently has since
Go seems to be a really good language to target due to its consistency and
simplicity. My only gripe with it is that it feels too "big".

~~~
jlarocco
I'm not sure I understand your comment.

Specifically, Red is a dialect of Rebol, not Lisp. And after a quick glance
through the docs (or I guess the Rebol docs they recommend using), and the
Wikipedia pages for Red and Rebol, it doesn't seem any more Lispy than Ruby or
Python.

Also, the easiest way to get a lot of libraries would be to have easy C
interop. At this point there are far more C libraries available than Go
libraries.

~~~
greggirwin
Red isn't a dialect of Lisp, nor exactly of Rebol. Red is descended from
Rebol, and the two are very compatible. Rebol, in turn, has its heritage in
Lisp, Forth, and Logo, with prototype objects as in Self. Both the Red and R3
teams see compatibility as a good thing going forward.

And you have C interop today, though it will get easier in the future.

~~~
jlarocco
TBH, Lisp is far more popular than Red and/or Rebol. I think most programmers
who pay any attention to C++, Java, Scala, Clojure, Python, Ruby, Perl, or any
other modern language can tell you a little bit about Lisp, because their
language of choice has probably recently borrowed some Lisp features. The same
thing can't really be said for Red/Rebol.

~~~
iceflow19
The irony is that some core concepts in Rebol have been borrowed into the
mainstream, the trouble being that people just don't realize it. Rebol was a
major influence on JSON. Crockford used to be active in the community, and had
really hoped for an opensource Rebol. Carl, who created the language didn't
want that, so Douglas created JSON instead, as a way of bringing some of the
concepts of Rebol's Data Exchange Dialect to the opensource masses. One
regrettable thing is that the there was a definite loss in the syntax and
semantics by making what would become JSON intelligible to Javascript.

------
jamii
Red/System is interesting - [http://static.red-lang.org/red-system-
specs.html#section-1](http://static.red-lang.org/red-system-
specs.html#section-1) \- a similar approach to Lua/Terra -
[http://terralang.org/](http://terralang.org/)

------
kseistrup
“For Linux 64-bit distros, you need to install 32-bit supporting libraries.”

Does that go for the binary distribution only, or also if you want to compile
the source yourself?

~~~
iceflow19
The compilers for Red and Red/System are written in Rebol2. The binary
distribution is just an encapsulated Rebol interpreter with source code.
Rebol2 needs the 32-bit supporting libraries.

~~~
kseistrup
Oh, ok. So Rebol2 isn't compilable on a 64-bit machine? Too bad.

~~~
dragonwriter
Rebol 2 isn't open source, and, AFAIK, is only available in binary
distributions.

R3 is open source (Apache License), but Rebol 2 is proprietary.

~~~
kseistrup
Thanks.

It seems Red is not comtaible with Rebol3 (or I did something wrong).

~~~
iceflow19
Red is not compatible with Rebol3, due in part to the fact that development on
Red started before Rebol3 was open-sourced. The binaries for Rebol3 at the
time were too unstable, so the older and much more solid Rebol2 was chosen.
There is a major undertaking underway currently though to refactor and fix
large portions of Rebol3's core code. Which will then be rolled into the
community edition and also hopefully the corporate sponsored Atronix fork.
Also there is some talk going around about packaging and integrating TinyCC
with Rebol3. IMO both projects show alot of promise, and have many progressive
ideas.

------
hamdouni
The binaries produced by red compiler are really very small. With an IOS and
Android target, it can be a very interesting choice to mobile apps. And
writing code in red seems very concise. It's like having the expressiveness of
a functional language and the efficiency of a compiled one.

------
zeeone
Red seems like a very ambitious project to be completed by a single developer.
I've only briefly looked at the syntax, but it seemed to me that it's not very
clear. The excess use of brackets is visually confusing.

~~~
Zelphyr
Its an Open Source project and, while it could use more developers I'm sure
(most OSS projects could), it is definitely not only being worked on by one
developer.

Once you start writing in it you realize how much the syntax often reads like
an English sentence. And the brackets make perfect sense when you begin to
understand blocks. And besides; its no more than curly braces in C and
definitely fewer than parentheses in Lisp.

~~~
ignorabilis
Parenthesis in Lisp are not more than those in C. It's just that there is only
one type of parenthesis and the accepted convention is to pile all the closing
ones at the last line. When you have some time play with them in both C and
Lisp and count them.

------
mc_hammer
everything but sliced bread. looks very good.

