Red Programming Language Blog

100% agree with your sentiment. Maybe it's just the case that disruption is needed every decade or two to keep things fresh and interesting.

Anyone who has dipped a toe into modern frontend web development and hasn't stayed for long enough to drink the kool-aid knows that it's a shitshow. You need a toolchain a mile long just to get some basic stuff on the screen, a far cry from the easy learning curve (lol!) of Perl outputting HTML via cgi-bin in your home directory 20 years ago. Okay, sure, you have access to a lot of visually pretty things now, but ultimately a lot of that could have been implemented at the browser level by exposing primitives that were more useful right from the start, rather than downloading a few megs of Javascript to emulate a reasonable environment on top of an unreasonable one.

Remember the 1.44MB QNX magical floppy disk demo? Entire OS and a Javascript-capable web browser in less space than it takes to visit the average corporate homepage now. Something is wrong here. I don't think there has to be a tradeoff where the programming languages become insanely difficult for average developers in order to use less space, either; it's not like modern JS is particularly easy.

https://www.red-lang.org/ is something in the right direction. The language itself looks a little confusing still, but I love the idea of a small binary that can run it and produce decent GUIs out the other end. We need to revisit the basic assumptions and produce something that…

Rebol, is mostly "dead", and I don't like to so easily throw the term around. But, originally it started out as a proprietary commercial language, then when it couldn't make enough money, went open source. It has some good concepts, and passionate followers, but didn't go mainstream. Even though it went open source, in the flood of so many languages that exists now, continual development stalled. However, it did produce several offshoot descendant languages.

Something to point out, is there is a lot of old tutorials and information on Rebol that becomes more useful as references, if a person learns any of the descendant languages.

Red (https://www.red-lang.org), is a very good open source offshoot. If a person is choosing between them, I think most would recommend it. But, the problem with Red is its development can be described as sluggish. The lead developers appear overly preoccupied with other projects, as oppose to getting Red into a more useful state and delivering on the stated goals and expected features.

For example, one of its main benefits is easy cross-compiling to other OSes. However, it's stuck in 32-bit, and needs to have a 64-bit version to keep pace with the requirements of macOS, iOS, and Android.

If Red's development was to keep on pace, which is important for multi-OS usability, I do think it would be worth knowing. Quite powerful and easy to learn language, for potentially a wide variety of purposes, with a light footprint.

You just cast some light on a major misunderstanding.

It's irrelevant whether would you like to take a trip or not.
It's like medicine.
Many of us know how it works.
You should try taking it even if you don't feel the urge.
Based on what you said so far, it's very likely to be effective.

For example I went on a 5 weeks, inter-Europe trip in 2004 with MPlayer A'rpi when he was heart broken. All of my friends said I'm crazy to recommend such a remedy, but it worked! :) We were ~27yrs old only though...

I would be delighted to talk about meaningful work with you.
I see soooo many problems in the world unsolved... many just in software land.
The amount of knowledge required to evoke the help of hardware of software to solve real world problems is just ridiculous and very prohibitive for people who otherwise understand the problem domain well and have probably good ideas for solutions.

We will never know though whether their ideas were good solutions or not, because it's just beyond their capacity to learn all that bullshit we call "programming" nowadays.

Rebol, the http://easiestprogramminglanguage.com/ showed a possible direction.
A friend of mine is pursuing that direction by writing a modern incarnation http://www.red-lang.org/
He gave up his job, retreated from Paris to Montenegro and in the past 3 years he was living on donations, then just moved to Beijing recently for incubation at InnovationWorks. He is your age too...

Looking through the examples, macros and pattern-matching, for me that would be impressive like 10 years ago.

If you want to see really innovative, readable and powerful language check out Red. While the language development seems to be ceased, the ideas (coming from old proprietary Rebol language) of working with code and data go much deeper than just macros: it has built-in DSL (called parse) for making DSLs on the fly and not just pre-runtime code manipulations. https://www.red-lang.org/

And there is XL language which might have even more powerful extensibility features, like adding types or pattern matching or asynchronous processing. Sadly I couldn't compile and try the only implementation it has, only judging by the docs explaining its ideas. https://xlr.sourceforge.io/

Indeed, Rebol was groundbreaking in so many ways. Hard for some to understand, but for those whose brains have receptors for it there is nothing quite like it. Working in other langs can be hard once you're used to Rebol, because some things seem so obvious that you can't see why other langs don't do it.

I'm part of Team Red, working on Rebol's successor (https://www.red-lang.org/). We have a number of old Rebolers, but also a lot of new faces, and we're having a great time carrying the torch forward. We still have a lot of work to do, but by the end of the year we should have feature parity with R2, not to mention all the new features Red has, like a compiler, reactive system, Android support, and native GUIs.

Rebol is a great language that I've been using for years and still am using now. It was unfortunate it wasn't open sourced soon, but in 2012, we finally saw Apache-licensed version. Carl Sassenrath (also author of AmigaOS) the disappeared from the Rebol development (he's now working on Roku) but the community took over the bug-fixing and development and the language still lives on. For the latest "community" version of Rebol, have a look at [1].

There is also Red language [2] that is heavily inspired by Rebol, but is not only interpreted and can be compiled also.

[1] https://github.com/metaeducation/ren-c

[2] http://www.red-lang.org