Red is like a modernized Rebol, so if you learn Rebol, you have (mostly) learnt Red too.

Red doesn't constrain the anti-complexity fight to the language itself, though. It can already set you free from the "mother of all bloatwares", the GNU compiler toolchain and the "inherently insecure" C language.

Simply (hence a bit inaccurately) put:

You can write programs with the same logic and concepts as C but with Rebol syntax. It's good because it has a simpler&less syntactic sugar and allows unicode words as identifiers.

Such a "source code" is valid Rebol DATA too, so it's easy to introspect, transform, analyze, decorate it, you don't have to parse it as string...

You can compile - for example - a Linux ELF executable for the ARM processor on an x86 Windows machine and all you need is:

1, the ~300kiloBYTE rebol.exe (just 1 file!) http://www.rebol.com/downloads/v278/rebol-core-278-3-1.exe

2, the ~400kiloBYTE https://github.com/dockimbel/Red/archive/master.zip (from which the compiler is ~100 script files...)

NO MORE automake/autoconf coming from packages depending on m4, make, awk, sed, tr, etc and of course "need" a package manager which depends on perl/python/ruby and their "standard libraries" which alone are stored as a sea of small files, theeeen u need GCC with the ocean of .h files also packaged as *-dev packages coming with their meta info in their own files, etc etc...

Feel the contrast?

So Red is really super-cool, but for now it still depends on the ultra-small Rebol binary...

not sure if you're astro-turfing or really unaware of the difference, but in its time rebol had the level of awareness of, say, the rust language now - not something a lot of people used, but with a decent profile in the technical press. a known, interesting, but unlikely to make it language. a class B if you like.

in comparison, red is class C. it's new, has little awareness and little coverage. it's even less likely to make it.

this is not a judgement on the merits of either language (although if you want that, rebol's syntax aware approach looks more interesting to me than anything red has to offer), just trying to give a historical perspective: rebol was bigger than red is now and, i suspect, still has more users, even now. on the other hand, rebol is clearly heading down while red can only go up.

oh, sorry - above is wrong if red is derived from rebol. sorry again.