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Comment by spriggan3 | Hacker News Reader

Looks phenomenal, but the syntax is way too alien for me personally.

EDIT: just went to this page, that's some crazy stuff with very little coding, never heard of Red or REBOL before, what language paradigm is that?

http://easiestprogramminglanguage.com/easiest_programming_la...

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Red/Rebol is basically LISP without parentheses (highly dynamic and homoiconic). Syntax is weird but easy to grasp. Red/Rebol is basically a All-in-One Package as a tiny executable contains a lots of useful functions for which you would require the use of big, heavy libraries in C/C++.

Red/Rebol allows for very clean (subjective term!), short and concise code, which allows for easy long term maintenance and also leads to more work done in less amount of time.

The syntax is a big deviation than the imperative C-Style languages people are used to. But if you ask me, then well, it is for the good.

REBOL syntax is even closer to Logo. Logo is well-known for its "turtle graphics" drawing system but beyond that it is actually a full-featured dynamically scoped (traditionally) Lisp.

>REBOL syntax is even closer to Logo.

Heck, now that you say that, I think I agree, intuitively, though did not think of it before (and I've been checking out Red lately, and Rebol some time earlier). (Used Logo as a kid.) I'll have to analyze why. Interesting observation.

I didn't think of it as LISP without parenthesis. Glancing at it, I thought it might work different enough that I'd have a LISP-like headache wrapping my hand around it. I appreciate you telling me that as I might build up energy to take another go at REBOL/Red. High-level, DSL-driven languages are certainly advantageous over the competition in many attributes.

Holy shit I need to try it out. The syntax is extremely intuitive imo. And a 0.5 MB interpreter to top it off..

CORRECTION: Interpreter + AOT Compiler + Huge list of available functions + Parse Dialect + View Engine (GUI) + etc... All in <1 MB.

Puts Wirth to shame...

Not to say anything bad about Rebol, but .. K2 had a superfast interpreter, superfast and supereffective reactive GUI (with a milspec kind of look), and a superfast ha transactional database engine for about 400K static exe.

Alas, they dropped the GUI when K3 came out; the most recent available version K4 is ~400K without GUI, and the next version KPARC is a complete OS (boots on metal) with GUI, file system, database and everything at less than 1MB

The syntax is intuitive to some people, especially those named Arthur Whitney or using the nickname geocar (but I also find it intuitive); most others tend to disagree about how intuitive it is.

Impressive, but not intuitive for me. I feel I can learn any language that is not APL-based.

There's also Picolisp: a tiny Lisp with HTML/webbrowser-based GUI and integrated database (using Pilog, its own Prolog-inspired querying language). Latest source is 943 KB.

Its homepage was updated, I believe, last week: http://www.picolisp.com

Be sure to see http://re-bol.com/rebol_quick_start.html and http://re-bol.com/short_rebol_examples.r . The first Red versions of these document are available at http://redprogramming.com

The syntax may be alien on first look, but it makes lot of sense once you dig bit into it. It is multi-paradigm language with heavy focus on dialects (DSLs).

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