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Comment by throwaway7645 | Hacker News Reader

Always glad to see Red get some more attention. I think these little lightweight apps are the way to go for sure. I like freePascal + Lazarus too, but I wish they made certain things easier. Red's syntax isn't a silver bullet, but I like how they have DSLs for so many things and native data types for things like email and web scraping that would require libraries in other languages.

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>I like freePascal + Lazarus too, but I wish they made certain things easier.

Which things? Interested to know, because I too like both Red and FPC (I use FPC to make it easier to distinguish Free Pascal (Compiler) from FP for Functional Programming).

Hard to describe the beginner experience with FPC (nice acronym) + Lazarus and Rebol. Rebol has a lot of sites showing you how to build simple GUIs fast although some things are getting old (had trouble getting the native email functionality to work). So more beginner friendly doc would help both projects a lot. Also, I think it would help pointing out that certain things like connecting to an Oracle db are easy in C#/Java, but aren't obvious to me with FPC.

Got it, thanks. Yes, there can be such issues, with any project, but to some extent or in some cases, more with open source projects, particularly those without funding or good management - though of course closed source projects are not immune to such issues either.

Agreed!

>(had trouble getting the native email functionality to work)

Interesting. Did you manage to solve that? I had tried out a good number of Rebol features earlier, including some Internet ones [1], but do not remember if I tried email and if it worked or not.

[1] Pretty cool that you can do many Internet operations in one or a few lines of code, and also I like the functional / Lisp-y aspects of Rebol (and hence Red), and the minimal syntax.

I was just testing out the language a year or so ago, so it wasn't super high priority to get it to work. I didn't try very hard. I think you need to configure your email + password in the Rebol tool itself and it should work. Unfortunately a lot of the pre-packaged demo scripts call out to parts of the rebol site which no longer exist, so a little bit of bitrot.

One big problem there is that protocols aren't sitting still in time. As more things change, like moving SMTP to ESMTP, Rebol needed to keep up, but didn't always. R2 was closed source, which didn't help. The protocol schemes were all written in Rebol, so you could hack them, which many of us have done over time, but that was an area where docs were lacking and sorely needed, so not many people could do it effectively.

Makes sense, thanks.

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