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I've noticed that Red shows up on HN with some regularity, and it sounds interesting. But I don't really understand where it comes from or who it's meant for.

I've noticed that Red shows up on HN with some regularity, and it sounds interesting. But I don't really understand where it comes from or who it's meant for. The Red / REBOL community seems more than usually self-contained, although it's possible that it's because almost everybody involved is Czech, and I am not. It seems like most of the English-language resources for Rebol were written by one guy with a thing for really long website names like withoutwritingcode.com.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> The Red / REBOL community seems more than usually self-contained, although it's possible that it's because almost everybody involved is Czech, and I am not. REBOL being proprietary when the big F/OSS scripting languages were taking off in popularity was probably a problem for mindshare and community breadth.
pebblexe 10y ago
I remember reading somewhere that there is funding/support from China. I can't find any support for that. I stumbled upon this site in my search though http://red.reb4.me/ http://red.reb4.me/
- mapcars 10y ago
  At least some part of the Red team works from China, that's true. And looks like you found an old website :)
- greggirwin 10y ago
  Yes, Team Red (as I like to call them), got some funding from a tech incubator, and Red's creator became Entrepreneur-in-Residence there for a time.
- vram22 10y ago
  This link has all the links from red-lang.org that were posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=red-lang.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=red-lang.org And from that I saw: http://www.red-lang.org/2015/01/dream-big-work-hard-and-make-it-happen.html http://www.red-lang.org/2015/01/dream-big-work-hard-and-make... which mentions the funding etc.
SwellJoe 10y ago
REBOL was first built by Carl Sassenrath, who is probably best known for his work on the Amiga operating system. REBOL was cool, but happened when a half dozen similarly cool languages sprung up that also had the feature of being free and open source (while REBOL was proprietary and cost a little money). REBOL had some novel ideas, and some shortcuts for some particular types of development making for strikingly concise code in some specific cases, and overall a nice design. I think it's neat that there's an OSS implementation, but I have so many other things on my todo list that I've never done more than give it a glance. I just don't see how I'd make productive use of it in the kinds of projects I do (given interop requirements I have).
- throwaway7645 10y ago
  Please give Red a look. It can run like Python or can be made compiled AOT to a tiny binary using a C like systems language that runs fast. You can call Red from C and possibly vice-versa (not sure bout the latter). It has an awesome REPL, amazing GUI DSL, is homoiconic like lisp for easy macros, and is OS/free. I'm not sure where this couldn't be used as it can be both super high level or very low level.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Ill add they have Red/System for low-level. Some kernel or server coders should try putting some code through it to see how it does.
    - throwaway7645 10y ago
      Fair enough, even if it is great, it won't have 30 years of optimizations like some C compilers, but hopefully it is still really fast.
      - greggirwin 10y ago
        The compiler doesn't optimize at all right now, but aims for simplicity. There was an article some time back about the best switches to use for most C compilers: compile for size. It often gave some of the best performance IIRC, the rationale being better cache use on chips.
pekr 10y ago
Not everybody is from Czech, but I am. History of Red comes back to the Rebol era, which goes back to the Amiga era and AmigaOS author, Carl Sassenrath, who created Rebol. Czech Amiga scene had strong following, hence some ppl ended up following Carl and his Rebol. We moved on onto Red, which is strongly inspired by Rebol ...
soapdog 10y ago
Circa 1999 REBOL was our language of choice at our tiny company. It allowed our small team to develop faster than our competitors. We still did a ton of PHP and Java because our clients required it but lots of our internal tools were REBOL based and were quite pleasant to use and extend. I have been following Red from a distance waiting for it to be ready for the kind of usage I want to put it through (mostly small desktop apps). I think that Red / REBOL are among the most fun languages to use for personal projects. PS: Brazilian, not Czech...
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  Is Brazilian CompSci culture relatively oriented towards embeddable languages? Lua and Céu come from there too. Might explain the adoption rate of Red.
  - soapdog 10y ago
    I don't think we can say that Brazilian CompSci is oriented towards embedding. I studied at the university where Lua and Céu were created, so my personal experience is biased towards such languages and yet, I don't remember us focusing on the embedding part. Our REBOL experience was also not related to embedding but towards expressiveness and quick prototyping. I think I expressed myself badly, when I said "Brazilian, not Czech", I was just referring to myself, as a new non-Czech datapoint :-D, Red is not Brazilian.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> The Red / REBOL community seems more than usually self-contained, although it's possible that it's because almost everybody involved is Czech, and I am not. REBOL being proprietary when the big F/OSS scripting languages were taking off in popularity was probably a problem for mindshare and community breadth.

pebblexe 10y ago

I remember reading somewhere that there is funding/support from China. I can't find any support for that. I stumbled upon this site in my search though http://red.reb4.me/ http://red.reb4.me/

mapcars 10y ago
At least some part of the Red team works from China, that's true. And looks like you found an old website :)
greggirwin 10y ago
Yes, Team Red (as I like to call them), got some funding from a tech incubator, and Red's creator became Entrepreneur-in-Residence there for a time.
vram22 10y ago
This link has all the links from red-lang.org that were posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=red-lang.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=red-lang.org And from that I saw: http://www.red-lang.org/2015/01/dream-big-work-hard-and-make-it-happen.html http://www.red-lang.org/2015/01/dream-big-work-hard-and-make... which mentions the funding etc.

SwellJoe 10y ago

REBOL was first built by Carl Sassenrath, who is probably best known for his work on the Amiga operating system. REBOL was cool, but happened when a half dozen similarly cool languages sprung up that also had the feature of being free and open source (while REBOL was proprietary and cost a little money). REBOL had some novel ideas, and some shortcuts for some particular types of development making for strikingly concise code in some specific cases, and overall a nice design. I think it's neat that there's an OSS implementation, but I have so many other things on my todo list that I've never done more than give it a glance. I just don't see how I'd make productive use of it in the kinds of projects I do (given interop requirements I have).

throwaway7645 10y ago
Please give Red a look. It can run like Python or can be made compiled AOT to a tiny binary using a C like systems language that runs fast. You can call Red from C and possibly vice-versa (not sure bout the latter). It has an awesome REPL, amazing GUI DSL, is homoiconic like lisp for easy macros, and is OS/free. I'm not sure where this couldn't be used as it can be both super high level or very low level.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Ill add they have Red/System for low-level. Some kernel or server coders should try putting some code through it to see how it does.
  - throwaway7645 10y ago
    Fair enough, even if it is great, it won't have 30 years of optimizations like some C compilers, but hopefully it is still really fast.
    - greggirwin 10y ago
      The compiler doesn't optimize at all right now, but aims for simplicity. There was an article some time back about the best switches to use for most C compilers: compile for size. It often gave some of the best performance IIRC, the rationale being better cache use on chips.

pekr 10y ago

Not everybody is from Czech, but I am. History of Red comes back to the Rebol era, which goes back to the Amiga era and AmigaOS author, Carl Sassenrath, who created Rebol. Czech Amiga scene had strong following, hence some ppl ended up following Carl and his Rebol. We moved on onto Red, which is strongly inspired by Rebol ...

soapdog 10y ago

Circa 1999 REBOL was our language of choice at our tiny company. It allowed our small team to develop faster than our competitors. We still did a ton of PHP and Java because our clients required it but lots of our internal tools were REBOL based and were quite pleasant to use and extend. I have been following Red from a distance waiting for it to be ready for the kind of usage I want to put it through (mostly small desktop apps). I think that Red / REBOL are among the most fun languages to use for personal projects. PS: Brazilian, not Czech...

vanderZwan 10y ago
Is Brazilian CompSci culture relatively oriented towards embeddable languages? Lua and Céu come from there too. Might explain the adoption rate of Red.
- soapdog 10y ago
  I don't think we can say that Brazilian CompSci is oriented towards embedding. I studied at the university where Lua and Céu were created, so my personal experience is biased towards such languages and yet, I don't remember us focusing on the embedding part. Our REBOL experience was also not related to embedding but towards expressiveness and quick prototyping. I think I expressed myself badly, when I said "Brazilian, not Czech", I was just referring to myself, as a new non-Czech datapoint :-D, Red is not Brazilian.