I'm always amazed when I see things like Red, with a 1MB executable with an interpreter, compiler, GUI, networking libraries, parsing libraries, and more all built in.

Or the QNX demo disk back in the day. OS, GUI, web browser (with javascript), full clustering support, and more, on a single 1.44MB floppy.

I've heard of the QNX OS...that seems magical.

Not to mention Red can cross compile for multiple OSes and the parse dialect that is basically generalized, readable regular expressions.

My personal theory why Rebol/Red didn't succeed in the mainstream is steep learning curve, it's hard to discover how to do things if you haven't already done some substantial programming work in it. While built-in help is good you need to know what you're looking for. (Delphi had better help in this matter, with examples etc.).

By the way I wonder why Pecan's post is [dead], it doesn't seem to be violating any rule.

Open it (click the duration), and click vouch. Arc has some (necessarily-)undocumented flagging code, and it frequently backfires.

The worst-case scenario is when you open the account in question and every single comment is grey... it hurts to see. (In that case, the account itself has been flagged. Not quite the same as reddit's shadowbanning, but only technically not the same.)

It's bittersweet that the moderation here is paid: there are AFAIK only two people (but don't quote me on that). There were some hazy plans to give some users fractionally elevated capabilities at some point, but it just hasn't happened yet.

Thanks a lot for this tip! Actually I'm amazed on how little workforce is necessary to keep this place running. I'm browsing with showdead on and rarely see the flagging backfires like this one.

> didn’t succeed in the mainstream

Is that true of Red? I was playing with it the other day and it looked really promising, and I was under the impression that it’s still quite new and hasn’t reached 1.0 (my point is that it might not be at a stage where we can write it off).

> it’s still quite new and hasn’t reached 1.0

According to the main page [0] the project was unveiled 6 years ago. For comparison Rust (a random example) started 7 years ago [1] but compare results for "Rust" and "Red/Rebol" on Algolia [2] (sorry no deep links). It's clear Red is niche.

I'm not writing it off. It's definitely one of most interesting languages and runtimes but it's super hard to capture people's attention nowadays when you don't have support of large companies (Go, Rust, .NET).

[0]: http://www.red-lang.org/search?updated-max=2011-03-29T15:38:...

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)

[2]: https://hn.algolia.com/

Hmm, you're right. I didn't realise it was 6 years old!

Yea, sorry bout that. Red isn't 1.0 yet and I have very high hopes for it. I meant just Rebol (ancestor of Red) in my earlier post and corrected it.

Kdb (the weird line-noise functional programming language) is similar. The trial version is a 200KB binary.

Isn't Kdb the database you can program in Q now, but also has K the PL too? I program in J, which is similar. I don't consider it line noise, but I get the drift.

[edit] yes, KDB+ is the database product. Q is one interpreter that interops with it. K is another.

I am not 100% sure but I think Q is actually K plus a standard library of "Q words" so you can write K directly if you want.

I think the reason for Q is as a more familiar interface for people with SQL experience.

The author of Kdb is Arthur Whitney. He is another extreme programmer who has had a huge influence on fintech and made boat loads of cash I would presume.

Just want to say that it's awesome to see Rebol/Red and K mentioned in a comment thread about Chuck Moore.

It's interesting because Rebol and K have almost totally opposite philosophies about how software should be structured. K emphasizes flat namespaces and leans heavily on the primitives and only a handful of functions. Rebol encourages writing DSLs to fit the language to the problem.

But despite different philosophies, they both allow incredible programmer productivity. I think a lot of this productivity comes from adherence to "Do not speculate!" and therefore not having a bunch of non-useful functionality or boilerplate for the end-user programmer to have to manage.

Agreed. Very different, yet similar philosophies if you squint hard enough. Aaron Hsu did an AMA on here and put it on YouTube showing his GPU compiler for APL code written in APL. The entire thing is maybe 5-10 pages of one-liners and looks darn elegant to me. During his lengthy talk on HN he shows you don't need zillions of abstractions if you can keep all the code in a few screens. He uses Notepad (not Notepad++ even) as an editor too. To me, in a way that makes sense as having to use a gargantuan IDE to manage your gargantuan code base seems wrong on some level. Forth users just take that sentiment one step further and only even include the primitives in their language that they need.

Relevant hn link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13797797

See also the top comment by Dang, with a link to the original thread.

He also helped in the development of J with Roger Hui and Ken Iverson, the creator of APL, by writing a one page interpreter for J over an afternoon or two. I am always drawn to prototyping and writing solutions in J. I am not a web developer, but for mathematics and statistics, it is amazing. I've always wondered how similar and different K and J are on a deep level, but I have always stuck with J.

Norman Thompson has a J book I'm reading and it is mind melting.

Yes; see the 5th-last paragraph of http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320 for a concrete answer to this. (Getting to said paragraph by way of all the paragraphs before it is, of course, highly recommended.)

Yes, I'm mad that the subject of the above URL is still, to quote the article, "dark."