[HN Gopher] Red Programming Language
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Red Programming Language
Author : hotpocket777
Score : 77 points
Date : 2025-05-20 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.red-lang.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.red-lang.org)
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| "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
| Internet TV set-top boxes."
|
| What a legend!
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| kbelder wrote:
| 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.
| gt0 wrote:
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| I figured they were cooked when they started doing weird
| cryptocurrency-related stuff. I really hope they get to their 1.0
| release someday.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| 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 ambitious of course, but
| how close are we to where this is at a stage where most would
| consider it production worthy.
| troupo wrote:
| 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
| ConanRus wrote:
| 32 bit only
| ttoinou wrote:
| 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
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| 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?)
| TOGoS wrote:
| The square brackets aren't really analogous to Lisp's
| parentheses; REBOL / RED use parentheses for the same
| purpose, if you need them. The square brackets are more like
| square brackets in Factor or Joy; they are 'quotations'
| around a list of words (or other syntactic structures;
| basically they make a list that is _not_ evaluated
| immediately).
| timbit42 wrote:
| 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.
| TOGoS wrote:
| I wrote a paper on REBOL back in college. It is very
| interesting, but the syntax is definitely weird. You might
| think of the function call syntax as being sort of Forth-like,
| but with the tokens in reverse order. So like a Lisp, but
| without required parentheses. e.g. in the example
| send friend@rebol.com read http://www.cnn.com
|
| `read` knows that it takes one argument, and `send` knows that
| it takes two, so this ends up being grouped like
| (send friend@rebol.com (read http://www.cnn.com))
|
| (which I think is valid syntax; that AST node is called a
| 'paren').
|
| Weirdly, the language also has some infix operators, which seem
| a bit out-of-place to me. I have no idea how the 'parser'[1]
| works.
|
| [1] 'parsing' happens so late that it feels funny to call it
| that. The thing that knows how to treat an array as a
| representation of an evaluatable expression and evaluate it.
| andoando wrote:
| [delayed]
| dmitrygr wrote:
| >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
| pfych wrote:
| I spent too long trying to learn this & hoon, not worth it
| ;_;
| croemer wrote:
| The website looks like 2013 and much of the content is as well.
| There's a GitHub repo that I couldn't find from the website:
| https://github.com/red/red
| worldsayshi wrote:
| The repo seems to be alive and kicking.
| niek_pas wrote:
| I haven't looked at this in detail, but it seems they confuse
| "human-friendly syntax" with "absence of (<[{".
| 38 wrote:
| red was terrible in 2018, and its terrible now - just tried to
| compile hello world and it takes 36 seconds
|
| https://github.com/red/red/issues/5615
| zerealshadowban wrote:
| ah, this is not about the Red Language that Intermetrics designed
| in 1977-79 to satisfy the Steelman requirements of the DoD's High
| Order Language Working Group... (the Green Language won and
| became known as Ada).
|
| I thought maybe someone had put the DoD's Red language spec
| online.
|
| And yes, someone has: https://iment.com/maida/computer/redref/
| bsrkf wrote:
| When I look at a programming language site, especially for a
| "new" language, I want a quick way to navigate to a reasonably
| sized decent code sample, ideally documented, showing off
| significant language features, idiomatic syntax and usage
| patterns etc...
|
| Sites which do this well (just from the top of my head):
| https://odin-lang.org/ immediate code sample visible
| "See the Full Demo" "See More Examples"
| https://ziglang.org/ immediate code sample scroll
| down a bit, "More Code Samples"
|
| Here on red-lang.org... I can barely find a consecutive
| meaningful chunk of code... ? "Getting Started"
| Nope "Documentation" Nope "Official Documentation"
| link to github
| https://github.com/red/docs/blob/master/en/SUMMARY.adoc
| "Home" merely a chronologically sorted blog
| newest entry links to 50 line "script" by chance
| showing off multi-monitor support (doesn't seem like a
| super helpful sample) ?
| taylorallred wrote:
| Languages that encourage making DSLs are a two-edged sword. On
| the one hand, you get to make a language that is more clear and
| fine-tuned to your use-case. On the other, you have an ad-hoc
| language with no support that you have to maintain along with the
| documentation (considering that you can't expect anyone else to
| know the DSL ahead of time). As I've gotten older, I've
| determined that well-designed APIs in a well-known language are a
| better alternative to DSLs.
| vidarh wrote:
| An API is just as much a DSL.
| fuzztester wrote:
| I have tried Rebol out a little, multiple times over the years.
| it's a cool language. I like it.
|
| I also got to know about Red early, followed it and tried it out
| for a bit.
|
| but as others have said, that move to crypto, to fund the dev
| work and make the devs money, put me off for good. nothing wrong
| with making money, let them make plenty, I just didn't jive with
| crypto as a way of doing it.
|
| sad about it going that route
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(page generated 2025-05-20 23:00 UTC)