I've followed Red for a long time, occasionally downloaded builds, and currently hold some of the token.
As of right now I have these thoughts:
* I think the focus on crypto could be a long shot, because my observation is that it's premised on capturing the notoriously fickle dev tools market...
* ...But in the end, Red has to get into a niche and own it and the team is, as some in this thread are suggesting, fanatical enough about what they're doing and confident in its strengths, that they are likely to go farther than anyone else had considered. Which is good enough to make me speculate on it.
* Although Red produces some great demos right now, the lineage of Rebol has its downsides too, since with a lot of these demos, when you get past the trivial and start customizing the UX in fine grain detail, a brick wall of unconventional paradigms is exposed which means that even if I'm experienced in other systems, I start needing a higher level of documentation and handholding. This is not an issue exclusive to Red and frequently impacts software libraries, but one way in which a lot of projects cheat on this problem is to emulate an existing API with lots of adoption and say, "Look, we're the same!" And then they don't have to document, they just steal the existing users.
* Regarding the pace of announcements, there's a rule of thumb Valve worked out for updates of Team Fortress 2 years ago(discussed in one of the articles or talks from then) that I see as more-or-less applicable to all software: Roughly every two months, make a large release with a detailed summary narrative. Project news is a great marketing tool when it's sized like this. Smaller releases tend to not make headlines, larger ones don't have a larger impact. So that's a proposed benchmark for what Red could be doing. The fact that this post blew up is a sign that something is going well, though :)
As of right now I have these thoughts:
* I think the focus on crypto could be a long shot, because my observation is that it's premised on capturing the notoriously fickle dev tools market...
* ...But in the end, Red has to get into a niche and own it and the team is, as some in this thread are suggesting, fanatical enough about what they're doing and confident in its strengths, that they are likely to go farther than anyone else had considered. Which is good enough to make me speculate on it.
* Although Red produces some great demos right now, the lineage of Rebol has its downsides too, since with a lot of these demos, when you get past the trivial and start customizing the UX in fine grain detail, a brick wall of unconventional paradigms is exposed which means that even if I'm experienced in other systems, I start needing a higher level of documentation and handholding. This is not an issue exclusive to Red and frequently impacts software libraries, but one way in which a lot of projects cheat on this problem is to emulate an existing API with lots of adoption and say, "Look, we're the same!" And then they don't have to document, they just steal the existing users.
* Regarding the pace of announcements, there's a rule of thumb Valve worked out for updates of Team Fortress 2 years ago(discussed in one of the articles or talks from then) that I see as more-or-less applicable to all software: Roughly every two months, make a large release with a detailed summary narrative. Project news is a great marketing tool when it's sized like this. Smaller releases tend to not make headlines, larger ones don't have a larger impact. So that's a proposed benchmark for what Red could be doing. The fact that this post blew up is a sign that something is going well, though :)