The Red Programming Language

https://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html

by andsoitis • 3 years ago

222 159 3 years ago

red-lang.org

adastra22• 3 years ago

Sounds like an amazing language. Not a single code example. The first link I click 404’s. Is this a thing?

andsoitis• 3 years ago

One place where you can see code examples: https://www.red-by-example.org/

jrumbut• 3 years ago

I found this page a little clearer:

https://www.red-lang.org/p/getting-started.html?m=1

Zuider3• 3 years ago

Red is based on the Rebol language and is said to be 95% compatible with Rebol 2.7. The Red website includes links to the tutorials and code examples for Rebol alongside Red specific links.

cabalamat2• 3 years ago

Seems a bit odd that the Windows version has a GUI but not the Linux one. Building a GUI on top of Tk (like Python does) would probably not be hard.

ducktective2• 3 years ago

Windows version has a GUI but not the Linux one

Not odd at all, in fact, just another consequence of the ridiculous fragmentation in Linux scene

Izkata• 3 years ago

Rebol had both (and more) decades ago, so it does seem odd to me Red doesn't given how much of it was inspired by that. IIRC its original concept was "open-source rebol".

t0astbread• 3 years ago

Why would fragmentation imply you can't have a GUI? You would just pick one toolkit and depend on it being there (unless you statically link it). Setting it up correctly is then the job of the user or distributors.

cabalamat2• 3 years ago

And yet the same ridiculous fragmentation doesn't prevent Python from having a GUI that works on Python.

mega-tux• 3 years ago

I remember seeing some progress on the Gtk port on the blog, i think I tried last year with some success

bradrn2• 3 years ago

There is a Linux GUI! I’ve used it — it seems to work fine.

rebolek4• 3 years ago

Not true, Linux version has GTK-based GUI.

pepa65• 3 years ago

It seems they do have `view` for Linux.

jeremyw• 3 years ago

Since examples were hard to find:

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/red/

https://www.red-by-example.org/

LatticeAnimal• 3 years ago

Thank you so much for finding those!

Despite the promising description, the language design looks pretty... quirky.

nmz2• 3 years ago

I don't know about quirky, back when I first found out about it, it was surprising that I could read it without having written a single line of code on it. That's damn impressive.

To me, its type system and parsing nature are one of a kind, to be able to label everything as what it is

  [money!] is $12.53
  [tuple!] is 5.5.5.5
  [date!] is 16-Jul-2023/21:00:17

means the parser immediately parses and type checks everything, all while looking as human readable as possible.

bradrn2• 3 years ago

It’s homoiconic, so the quirkiness serves very similar goals to, say, Lisp.

deafpolygon• 3 years ago

I am not a fan of the syntax. I'll just leave that here.

chuckledog• 3 years ago

Does the compiler work on a Mac M2?

nateb2022• 3 years ago

Yes. Currently it emits Intel Mach-O's, and is one itself, however this is not an issue thanks to Rosetta.

fuzztester3• 3 years ago

Unintel machos is more like it :)

foobarbecue• 3 years ago

Looking forward to the Fireship video!

385• 3 years ago

been a while since I played with Red, but from what I remember the problem was this:

1. default compile mode was shared, so all executables relied on a "libred.dll" or similar

2. compiling "libred" was really slow (1 minute), but after that its done and skipped in the compile stage, making compile much faster (but still with the limitation of #1)

3. you can compile static, but then the static "libred" needs to be compiled EVERY TIME, making every single static compile, even "hello world" take one minute EVERY TIME.

I posted multiple issues about #3, but they were closed each time as "wont fix" or "working as intended" or similar. So OK fine, I just moved onto Go and Rust, even C, plenty of other languages that dont have this issue.

Zamiel_Snawley• 3 years ago

Is the intended workflow to use dynamic linking when developing, and static(if you want it) for release?

If so, that sounds reasonable to me.

385• 3 years ago

yes, that was one of the arguments. however I dont accept that. I have used C, C++, C#, Crystal, D, Go, Nim, Rust and Zig, none of which have this issue.

PrimeMcFly2• 3 years ago

1 minute really isn't that long.

385• 3 years ago

I guess when I put "every time" in all caps twice I was being too subtle.

lgas• 3 years ago

It is if you don't want your train of though interrupted.

mock-possum• 3 years ago

Based on what

vore• 3 years ago

Imagine tweaking some parameter to see how the result changes but having to wait 1 minute every time for the answer...

culebron213• 3 years ago

Sounds like exactly the problem of Julia language. On the surface, Julia seems slick in code and fast in running. But then you discover that

1. there are no objects, so when you switch from Python, instead of chains of methods, like `my_dataframe.groupby(...).aggregate(...).groupby(...).aggregate(...)` you need either (a) a lot of poorly readable nested calls, or (b) ugly "pipes", where the left side is implicit first param of the function on the right side: ` my_df |> groupby(...) |> aggregate(...) |> groupby(...) |> aggregate(...)`. (Writing them, you feel insecure of what is happening -- in this case, what gets passed to the function.)

2. You can't make it a CLI script, because it compiles the whole code WITH dependencies every time, and as soon as you import some serious libraries, compile times will skyrocket. I quickly hit 40 seconds of compilation with just geospatial lib and dataframes. These 40 seconds turned out to be A LOT when you develop interactively. And you can't build everything in a Jupyter Notebook, because eventually you'll have to switch to a CLI script.

I think I could put up with pipes, but the compilation times were the final argument against Julia.

troupo4• 3 years ago

(b) ugly "pipes", where the left side is implicit first param of the function on the right side: ` my_df |> groupby(...) |> aggregate(...) |> groupby(...) |> aggregate(...)`. (Writing them, you feel insecure of what is happening -- in this case, what gets passed to the function.)

These are not ugly pipes. These are a very common feature in a lot of functional languages. Once you've used them, you want them everywhere :)

And of course you know exactly what is passed to the function. You wrote it yourself: left side is passed as the first param of the function on the right side.

rebolek4• 3 years ago

While what you write is more or less true, the biggest problem here is that compilation is OPTIONAL. Red scripts can run in the interpreter just fine and TBH I use compile very rarely.

it's a dynamic language with optional compilation, so complaining that the compiler is slow isn't very fair.

The compiler is written in Rebol (language Red is based on) which is dynamic language also, so that's why it's slow. Rebol itself is written in C and its scripts can't be compiled. You can of course bundle the script with the interpreter which is ~1-2MB with OS dependencies only.

(I used to work for Red and use Rebol in my job daily)

pmarreck• 3 years ago

I had a brief interest in REBOL before Ruby, and definitely before I decided I never wanted to deal with a language with mutable data ever again if I could help it

andrewstuart4• 3 years ago

The programming language I want has:

* the philosophy of zig in terms of simplicity

* the thread and memory safe nature of Rust - without Rust's kitchen sink approach to adding sub languages and complexity

* the simplicity and straightforwardness of TypeScript

385• 3 years ago

I dont think this really exists.

Zig does have some memory safety, but not as much as Rust of course. I think Zig made the decision to add as much safety as they could, without crossing the complexity boundary. any further memory safety and you're about in Rust land. maybe some middle ground language is possible, but not one that I know of.

Tozen4• 3 years ago

any further memory safety and you're about in Rust land...

That's not quite true. We have GC using languages (some allow it to be turned off), and for many or in many use cases, that would be enough. Other languages like Lobster, Vlang, Vale, etc... are developing/putting out easier to use alternatives.

rockwotj2• 3 years ago

Golang?

385• 3 years ago

jayd16• 3 years ago

If they literally mean safety then perhaps Golang fits the bill but they said safety _like Rust_. They probably still want the control that Rust provides.

satvikpendem• 3 years ago

Have you seen Vale? They're working on a new type of analyzer for memory errors, that apparently is simply and safer than Rust's [0].

[0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/first-regions-prototype

fwsgonzo• 3 years ago

For me, Vale would need to be able to produce static executables the way Go does, without pulling in a kitchen sink of DNS and curl+dependencies type of libraries.

skribanto• 3 years ago

Austral has been looking good to me as a potential "rust-lite". It's still in the very early stages though.

nine_k3• 3 years ago

If instead of Rust you'd take its close enough relative, OCaml, but without the GC and with more low-level machine access, maybe ATS would fit your bill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_%28programming_language%29

To my mind, BTW, Typescript is not that "straightforward" or "simple", but it has a pretty powerful type system, and I like that.

bachback• 3 years ago

thanks for this, is there a way to get a good overview over more exotic languages?

andrewstuart4• 3 years ago

When I look at Ocaml source code I feel like I’m reading mirror language.

hot_gril5• 3 years ago

The high-level language I want is JS. For mid-level, something like C++ but with Rust's automatic typing and way fewer unnecessary features.

danpalmer2• 3 years ago

JavaScript, really?

I get the practical reasons why it’s useful, but I’m surprised it’s anyone’s choice for the design of a high level language. Is Python or Ruby not a much better choice?

ukuina• 3 years ago

> the simplicity and straightforwardness of TypeScript

This is a bit of a headscratcher. TS is a kludgy attempt at adding type safety to a dynamically-typed and expressive language.

andrewstuart4• 3 years ago

Have you done much Ts programming?

It’s SO easy.

All programming languages should be this easy.

anta40• 3 years ago

The compiler is still a 32-bit app, so won't run on few recent Macs...

Zuider3• 3 years ago

Red is mostly written in Rebol 2.7 whose final release was in 2011 when most software was 32-bit. Until Red becomes fully self-hosting, it looks like there will not be a 64-bit version.

klodolph• 3 years ago

The idea that “application” is an abstraction level doesn’t sit right with me. I think that slide is a bit of a stretch.

An application, as a mass of code, will contain code that works at different abstraction levels.

e12e• 3 years ago

I had mostly given it up for dead - but it appears there was some significant news this June:

https://www.red-lang.org/2023/06/dynamic-refinements-and-fun...

Maybe a consequence of them walking their path to 1.0?

https://www.red-lang.org/2022/07/the-road-to-10.html

myspy• 3 years ago

There is no binary for ARM Macs so I guessed it is dead. And the site timestamp is frozen at 2020.

keithnz2• 3 years ago

when it came up before, I thought this was a pretty nifty code example in red https://www.red-lang.org/2016/07/native-reactive-spreadsheet...

rumblestrut2• 3 years ago

Whew. I’m glad this exists. It’s been a few days since yet another programming language has been introduced into the world.

Sarcasm aside, while I think striving to be better is great, sometimes I wish there was just a standard language for programming.

I realize it depends on the context (mobile, web, desktop application, different platforms) but it can feel overwhelming when in the end, they all pretty much do the same thing: tell a computer to do things.

steveklabnik• 3 years ago

It’s been a few days since yet another programming language has been introduced into the world.

Red is not a new language.

Tozen4• 3 years ago

Not at all. Is around 12 years old, and seems still quite far from hitting 1.0. I'm a bit amazed by that.

rumblestrut2• 3 years ago

Still new to many.

keithnz2• 3 years ago

not new, and red is actually quite interesting compared to other languages, worth having a good look.

Also, worth reading Paul Grahams "Blub Paradox" article from decades ago... http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html (hopefully you know who he is given you are here on HN)

hmry• 3 years ago

This language is more than 10 years old

brokenkebaby• 3 years ago

I wish there was just a standard language for programming.

Approved by a Central Planning Committee, I suppose?

chriswarbo• 3 years ago

sometimes I wish there was just a standard language for programming

Good news, there is such a standard, and you can buy it here: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/incits/ansix3531976r1998

Some choice quotes from the Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I ):

PL/I (Programming Language One) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language initially developed by IBM. The PL/1 ANSI standard, X3.53-1976, was published in 1976. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming.
IBM wanted a single programming language for all users.
The language is designed to be all things to all programmers.[vague]

nine_k3• 3 years ago

Was the Red language / environment using a non-free license some time ago? I see now it's basically under BSD 3-clause license; am I mistaking it for something else?

foul3• 3 years ago

It probably was Rebol that one. Rebol core is free and open source, the GUI distribution is instead released in binary form, as freeware (and exists only for rebol 2.7, we know about rebol3 only for Core).

foul3• 3 years ago

BUT! There's an open source version of Rebol3 with GUI, from Atronix. I still don't know how the hell it works, like, what does it pull for dependencies.

https://github.com/zsx/r3-gui

nine_k3• 3 years ago

Thanks!

I thought about another multiplatform, homoiconic, highly compact language: https://janet-lang.org/ (takes 803 kb on my machine).

It has no types though.

brutal_chaos_• 3 years ago

FYI, the link from the first bullet point "human friendly syntax" (aka syntax) points to https://pointillistic.com/ren/ which is broken, returning a page that states:

Not Found

The requested URL was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

HexDecOctBin• 3 years ago

I will take this opportunity to ask if someone can explain how Rebol/Red scoping works? I have read all the Bindology, etc. stuff and it's still not clear; I suspect it would be much easier to understand if someone could explain it in terms of how one would implement it in a interpreter (just like Dynamic scoping makes much more sense when explained that way).

Tozen4• 3 years ago

Interesting language. I think a major stumbling block was Red not running on 64-bit OSes. Not quite sure why that wasn't made a priority.

jomohke• 3 years ago

I'm surprised that I haven't heard of this line of languages before.

The home page of Rebol, which it says it's derived from, seems to do a much better job at stating its purpose: http://rebol.com/

hosh2• 3 years ago

Rebol reminds me a lot of Tcl/Tk, but I can’t tell if that is because there’s a dialect that resembles it, or that it takes inspiration from tcl’s command substitution.

rebolek4• 3 years ago

Tcl's command substitution is entirely string based, Rebol loads source and everything happens with internal values. That's a big difference.

spindle• 3 years ago

One of the reasons it's not so famous is that it's had various historical struggles, including being stuck at 32-bit for a long time IIRC (I'm hazy on the details and corrections welcome). I love it though.

vosper• 3 years ago

Also they went of down a cryptocurrency path for a while, not sure where that's at but it certainly seemed like a big distraction from finishing the main thing.

fanf2• 3 years ago

REBOL remained commercial closed source for a long time when the languages it was competing with were open source.

phforms• 3 years ago

Seems like the development is much more focussed since last year and a lot is happening with 1.0 (and 64-bit support) being on the way possibly by the end of this year. [1][2]

I am really looking forward to learn more about this language when 1.0 comes out, especially because of its ambitious feature list [3] (programming across the low/high-level spectrum, etc.), Lisp influences and the Logo-like syntax inherited from Rebol.

- [1] https://www.red-lang.org/2022/07/the-road-to-10.html - [2] https://www.red-lang.org/p/roadmap_2.html - [3] https://github.com/red/red

Aerbil313• 3 years ago

These one liners are fascinating! Why can't we have nice things like this? http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html

2 - Open a GUI, read web page, send it as email:

  view layout [u: field "user@rebol.com" h: field "http://" btn "Send" [send to-email u/text read to-url h/text alert "Sent"]]

timbit423• 3 years ago

The creator, Carl Sassenrath, also wrote the pre-emptive multi-tasking Amiga OS. He was a fan of Lisp and Logo and wrote Amiga Logo after he left Commodore. Rebol is based on Logo and Lisp.

nurettin• 3 years ago

Recently I had to target AIX and AS-400. Unfortunately I didn't even have a development environment for those projects, and cross-compiling wasn't available. So Java was pretty much the only option which let me keep my sanity. There just isn't anything like it.

jmpeax• 3 years ago

print output using print, or prin for printing without a newline

Crappy design when a common typo silently and slightly alters the functionality of your program.

boxed• 3 years ago

They should at least call it `print` for normal print and `prit` for the one without the n in it :P

hcks• 3 years ago

This is hilariously bad design bwahahahah

Makes me interested in learning more about Red to see more example of what to not do

quazar• 3 years ago

Why? These are two very common commands known by every programmer and used very often, why would having short mnemonics for them be confusing?

rightbyte• 3 years ago

I don't think a missing letter in such a short words is a common typo. It stands out.

You got eg. prin1 in Clisp which should be hard to distinguish in some fonts.

a3w• 3 years ago

prin is an alternate spelling of preen. Okay so something about boldy wearing their feathers is a preen/to preen? Can anyone confirm? Does not help in guessing what ``prin "helloworld"'' does.

timbit423• 3 years ago

So I take it you hate all unix shell commands.

asaka2• 3 years ago

And it's a ICOed programing language, maybe the first?

DarkNova6• 3 years ago

Sorry, what is an ICO? (I guess it's not the Indian Computing Olympiad )

mkl• 3 years ago

Initial Coin Offering: selling a bunch of cryptocurrency tokens as a combination of kickstarter and get-rich-quick scheme. Often a scam.

https://www.red-lang.org/2017/12/leaping-into-future-red-goe...

https://www.red-lang.org/2018/01/answers-to-community-questi...

raj555• 3 years ago

I don't understand the appeal of these langs, I mean its fun as a hobby to develop but srsly who uses it? Unless you show me real stuff like loading an image and manipulating it or opening a file and parsing text for some pattern etc all the factorials won't cut it. The syntax looks real pain in the slot, worse than modern C++ but atleast the latter works like a charm and easy to understand if you cut the clutter.

amno• 3 years ago

Never heard of it before, but I am a bit curious about it being homoiconic. I wonder how it comes into play in Red/Rebol world, a little more thorough. This page shows some examples of lisp-like 'apply: https://www.red-lang.org/. I wonder if the use of '[] is inspired by pre-modern lisp M-expressions (Mathematica is also using them), or is it for some other reason, like let's pretend we are not a lisp-like language so to not scare of folks? :) Square brackets and curly brackets are unfortunately harder to type on some layouts. On Swedish layout I have to press alt-gr to type those, while ordinary parenthesis are a bit simpler: I can use shift, which is found on both sides of the keyboard.

Perhaps such things sounds trivial, but in a language where they claim that programming should be fun, hard to type things are a bit of fun-killers. I also disslike both visually and if I would to type all those operators #,%,$,?,:,! etc. We humans are used to raede txet adn cna prase text even when mistyped without barely stopping, but the punctuation is a bit harder to read and type, and that for a reason. That becomes especially annoying if those signs are overloaded or combined, as in Perl or C++, which is probably one of the reasons that gives those languages "write-only" epithet.

I have seen the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KqNO_sDqm4 by Nenad, but it is from 2015. If they are still 4x slower than C for the compiled code, than I am very hard to believe they are a serious contender to become a systems programming language as they claim to be. Compare to sbcl (Common Lisp) where speed is almost approaching C in some cases. Having built-in toolchains and DSLs is nice, but it can also be a curse and made things harder to evolve and modernize.

While I sound like a very negative person, I do like some of the ideas in Red definitely. Built-in tasks, concurrency and homoiconicity sounds like a very nice features to start with.

luckystarr• 3 years ago

So from a first glance it looks like the love-child of LISP and Forth. Is that a correct assessment?

timbit423• 3 years ago

More like Logo and Lisp. Of course, Logo is also a Lisp.

Red is based on Rebol, which was created by Carl Sassenrath, the creator of the pre-emptive multi-tasking Amiga OS. When he left Commodore, he wrote Amiga Logo and the created Rebol.

patterns• 3 years ago

Nice to see Red getting attention. I have been playing with Rebol a while ago and I really liked how easy it is to do program manipulation and writing small DSLs.

However, I found debugging to be very difficult, once I wrote a more complex application. Are there good debugging tools for Red?

sambeau• 3 years ago

Carl Sassenrath, the creator of Rebol was head of OS at Amiga, and is the reason why the Amiga had real preemptive multitasking before Macs and PCs.

SkeuomorphicBee• 3 years ago

A bit off-topic, but what's with all the 404 links in that about page? With all the missing pages it felt like a treasure hunt to find any information about what the language actually looks like. Literally the first four links in the About page are either broken or point to unrelated pages, so it took me five clicks to find the first example of the language.

Zelphyr• 3 years ago

I was really hoping this was a 1.0 announcement but, I'll take what I can get.

Red is a really promising language. It, like Lisp, gets flak because of the syntax but that really becomes a non-issue pretty quickly once you start using it and the productivity gains you see from using it all but eliminate any reservations you might have about the syntax.

anyoneamous• 3 years ago

I liked the look of the REBOL syntax and was looking forward to trying it, so was then sad to discover that the Red examples look quite different.

The Red Programming Language

Related Stories