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kstrauser

This is a successor to REBOL[0], designed by Carl Sassenrath[1] who designed the Amiga kernel.

I've looked it a few times over the years. It's neat. I've never written a single line of it, though.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

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I don't remember how I found it, but REBOL was one of the first programming languages I learned around 25 years ago. Most of my personal projects are still written in it.

I have yet to try converting anything to Red.

I remember first hearing about it on TechTv's The Screen Savers way back when I think. I'm pretty sure it was demoed on a segment at one point.

I wrote a small app in REBOL once, just too automate some stuff for some managers in a job about 20 years ago. It's quite nice, but I don't think I'd want to write anything significant with it.

"In 1988, Sassenrath left Silicon Valley for the mountains of Ukiah valley, 2 hours north of San Francisco. From there he founded multimedia technology companies such as Pantaray, American Multimedia, and VideoStream. He also implemented the Logo programming language for the Amiga, managed the software OS development for CDTV, one of the first CD-ROM TV set-top boxes, and wrote the OS for Viscorp Ed, one of the first Internet TV set-top boxes."

What a legend!

Right? And I think that's what keeps bringing me back to REBOL, and thus Red. They don't appeal to me on the face of them. Like, the code examples look interesting but in a "magical" kind of way that strikes a little bit of fear into my engineering heart. But with that kind of pedigree, I can't dismiss the ideas. If Sassenrath came up with it, I bet there's a kernel of awesomeness inside.

I suspect a lot of the magic will fall away after realizing the block data structure (the square brackets) are pretty close to a Lisp list. And just like in Lisp, they're used for both code and data. One big difference is words are evaluated by default instead of just the first word in a list, so there's nowhere near as much nesting, and whenever an expression ends the next one can begin with no delimiter (but use newlines for legibility).

pretty sure he finished out his post Rebol career with Roku

One can go to his web page to find out what he's doing with himself.

I used it once to build a simple web scraper and image downloader, and it worked really great for that. It was right in the wheelhouse for the language. (That was REBOL, not RED, and many years ago.) Honestly I'd just do it in Python, now, even though it's not as interesting.

This is what I used it for back in the day too. I was watching a demo of Robot framework for Selenium the other day and it reminded me of parsing pages with rebol. Not that they are similar, but perhaps because I thought rebol would be interesting to use with Selenium.

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