Honestly, this looks like a mess and I don't understand the purpose of it if it's meant to be used by real users. Why would anyone prefer this?
Plenty of languages with familiar looking syntax which are horribly complicated. E.g. like C++ ;-)
Furthermore, don't get confused between styling and layout. The code is focused on layout, the styling can look just as modern as any other GUI framework.
Lastly, as to why anyone would use Red, it enables you to create full graphical apps in a small amount of code, and is designed to be compact (runtime under 1MB) and fast (native compilation). Once you get familiar with the syntax (which is easily done by reading a short tutorial) then you have quite a powerful tool at your disposal.
And yes, Rebol like syntax might feel kind of weird, when coming from other environments. But it is clean, unnecessary punctuation free, and once used to, very obvious and productive.
As for GUIs, Rebol featured custom one, Red uses binding to native widgets. Both aproaches have their advantages/disadvantages. You can bet, it will improve and I am the one, who would like to see "Metro" supported as far as Windows is concerned ....
Yeah, sort of like your comment is yet another comment to add onto the other hundreds of them (and us all here on HN are just yet another 10-20.000 humans to add to the other billions on earth).
>it can make GUIs that are Windows 7 era sort of
Because its GUI bindings is where a language is truly evaluated from...
>Honestly, this looks like a mess and I don't understand the purpose of it if it's meant to be used by real users. Why would anyone prefer this?
Based on Rebol, a very high level language, with extremely powerful DSLs (and easy to do DSL's in), with first class support for lots of things as types, homoiconic, very versatile and easy to get advanced results with very little code.
I didn't mean the GUI support was the basis of evaluating it and I guess my post came off as flippant.
It wasn't clear from their site though why this language should enter the mainstream. I couldn't really glean off the site if that's even their goal or not, it was pretty technical and not very inviting.
• Rebol in Ten Steps: http://rebol.com/rebolsteps.html
• Rebol Overview: http://www.rebol.com/docs/expert-intro.html
Rebol is an elegant attempt at better using language to solve problems. It offers a rich vocabulary centered around words and includes natural representations of various types, such as URLs (that you can query), emails (that you can send messages to), times, dates and more. The main data structure (blocks) are instrumental in language flow and can be manipulated as data before being interpreted as code:
• More than just code—A Deep Lake: http://www.rebol.com/article/0103.html
It is different and it's not immediately apparent what it brings to the table. However, that it does have this depth and is squeezed into a < 1 meg package without dependencies hints at why there are a few of us that consider it tremendously versatile and worthy of a more prominent place in the development firmament.