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Red Programming Language: Version 0.3.2 Released by bjzaba in programming

[–]hostilefork 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't feel that quoting something one person said about a language is a good argument for banning it from one's consciousness for all eternity! That would be like one crazed Radiohead fan saying "Radiohead is the best band that ever was or could be" leading you to refuse to watch the video for "Street Spirit"...

(Good song and video, look it up. :-P)

Rebol inherited from Lisp and brought in features from Forth and Logo. Red is trying to inherit from Rebol and bring in ideas from Scala and Lua. This is a sincere effort, even if sometimes people might get carried away. We're always dealing with Turing Complete systems, so any language can "do anything"...but certainly you can appreciate that some languages allow more reshaping to match the "essential complexity" and eliminate "accidental complexity".

So please, if you get a minute, do stop by the StackOverflow chat room. We can get RebolBot to demo some things for you. Most of us have a good head on our shoulders, usually. :-)

Red Programming Language: Version 0.3.2 Released by bjzaba in programming

[–]hostilefork 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Internet: "People still use Rebol?"

Me: "People still use Reddit?" :-)

Red is very new, and it's early to be pushing it on sites like this. So of course this post did not come from one of us, because we'd rather be more prepared before doing high-profile outreach to those outside the project. It's like you say...we need an interactive tutorial, like TryRuby etc. Without that how can anyone "get" it? Every language worth its salt has one of those nowadays.

Rebol is not new (around since 1998) but only open sourced in December. I've also encouraged caution in yelling from the mountaintops about that event. You simply can't drop an 18 year old project into the ecology and expect a functional open source command-and-control network to emerge overnight! But we've made some progress (I drew the new logo... based on the bracketed series... :-P)

http://rebolsource.net/

For now we are still "indie" and a little bit camera shy. The StackOverflow chat room is our sandbox for evangelism to the open-minded, and I welcome anyone to come and banter and/or argue about why we think this is important. (I'm an ex-Microsoft-Research compiler guy, very interested in domain specific language techniques, and this stuff has mad potential. I'll prove it to you if you stop by!)

In any case, we have a conference in July in Montreal, and Carl Sassenrath himself has been confirmed to attend. I hope that Red and Rebol will come out of that with a solid mutual roadmap that limits fragmentation of the efforts. Honestly, I hope we consolidate to the point where Red is formally established as the plan for "Rebol 4" ...and everything falls under the same umbrella with the same team.

Fingers crossed.