Red Programming Language

Heritage and Appeal

• Seen as a spiritual successor to REBOL with a strong pedigree; this history keeps some people interested even when the language itself feels “magical” or scary from an engineering standpoint.
• Several commenters used REBOL for small automation/web-scraping tasks and liked it, but wouldn’t choose it for large systems today.
• Some still write most personal projects in REBOL; others are curious about Red but haven’t migrated.

Syntax, Semantics, and Mental Model

• Many find Red/REBOL uniquely hard to internalize; code can be hard to read without knowing how arguments are grouped.
• Others explain it as: data “blocks” like Lisp/Logo quotations; Polish-notation–style evaluation; functions with fixed arity; almost everything is an expression; no mandatory parentheses.
• Infix operators are a special case: they’re evaluated strictly left-to-right with higher precedence than function calls, leading to surprising expressions unless you know the rules.
• A team member emphasizes: “everything is data until evaluated,” many literal datatypes, no keywords, and “free-ranging evaluation” (no parentheses around arguments) as core design choices.

Dialects / DSLs and parse

• Red calls embedded DSLs “dialects”; parse (for pattern matching/grammars) and VID (GUI description) are major built‑ins.
• parse operates on values and types, not just characters, and supports typesets (groups of related types), which some see as powerful and simpler than regexes.
• A long subthread debates DSLs vs APIs: DSLs praised for expressiveness in domains (regex, SQL, templating, shell); criticized as brittle, poorly tooled, and hard to maintain compared to conventional APIs.

Tooling, Docs, and Website

• Site is perceived as dated and makes it hard to find substantial, idiomatic examples; some only discover example code by digging in the GitHub repo.
• Documentation is widely considered thin and fragmented. Commenters note promises that “proper docs” would arrive at 1.0, but the project is still at 0.6.x with similar doc quality years later.

Maturity, Performance, and Platform Support

• Version progress is seen as very slow (0.6.4 in 2018 to 0.6.6 in 2025); some conclude the ambitious roadmap was “stratospheric.”
• One user reports a “hello world” taking ~36 seconds to compile; the team member acknowledges compile times are slow and not yet a priority.
• Red compiles to an internal low‑level dialect (Red/System) with direct machine code generation and cross‑compilation, but is still 32‑bit only, which is a deal‑breaker for some platforms.

Funding, Crypto, and Governance Concerns

• The project’s flirtation with crypto/ICO funding and a blockchain dialect turned several long‑time followers away.
• There is speculation about influence from funders and a move to China; some commenters believe this derailed the project, while others label that pure speculation.
• A phishing‑blocklist warning on the site sparks side discussion about community security tools vs “nanny state” overreach.

Overall Sentiment

• Technically curious language with elegant examples, powerful DSL support, and an unusual evaluation model.
• Enthusiasts praise its conceptual depth and cross‑stack ambitions; skeptics see stalled progress, poor docs, 32‑bit limitations, and odd funding choices as reasons not to invest.