Comment by 9214 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9214 | Hacker News Reader

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> They are well funded.

Rebol Technologies went bankrupt, and Rebol is de-facto dead since more than a decade; Red barely manages to get by thanks to a recent crypto spike.

> I would say the languages are very different in the sense that Beads is clearly aimed at graphical interactive software.

So is Red with it's native GUI engine. [1]

> Red exists as a systems programming language, a variant customized for building crypto contracts, and then as a general purpose language.

"Domain-specific languages" is the term you are looking for.

> They are so different that it is hard to compare.

Both share the same goal of replacing modern software practices with biased, batteries-included toolchain, varying only in implementation.

> Red being a concatenative language has more in common with FORTH than Algol.

Red is not concatenative in any sense of the word, nor any other language in Rebol family that I know of.

[1]: https://github.com/red/docs/blob/master/en/view.adoc

I don't find Red particularly readable, it is a bit too dense for my taste. But some people will love it, and they have a very active Gitter group, and they are very nice people.

Red is the best funded language that i know of. Nenad did an initial coin offering (ICO) that was successful, and by my estimates will never have to work again. He has a good-sized team, and is building a very powerful product. Don't confuse his frugality with the financial independence he possesses due to his good timing at jumping onto the crypto bandwagon.

I don't know how you describe Rebol/Red. It a language made out of various subdomain specific languages, with a very unique syntax. It is very brief, and to me looking at it from a distance it more resembles FORTH or Postscript than any Algol derivative language.

Red has not prioritized graphical interactive products. I think its best subsystem is its amazing PARSE module, which is second only to Icon in text processing power.

There are other interesting projects like Enso, but they will probably run out of money, but i will wager Red will still be going strong 10 years from now.

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