Comment by hjek

> > If anything, it sounds too easy, making me think "what's the catch?

> This is rude and uncalled for.

I think she/he raise a fair point about how the Red language is advertised, and it's actually a rather friendly to assume that it's due to language barrier.

Many posts about Red/Rebol are unequivocal praise with very few details or any acknowledgements of short-comings or limitations of the languages.

Just to dig up some random ones:

Here's a speed comparison between Rebol and Python[0]: Rebol is faster (surprise!), but the post doesn't contain or link to any of the code used for the comparison

Here's some grand self-praise from the Why Rebol/Red[1] on why it's just better than all other languages:

> You may be familiar with Clojure, Python, Ruby, Lua, frameworks like Ruby on Rails, or any of the multitude of Javascript frameworks which are purpose-built to "ease" particular types of development work. Such languages/tools/environments are certainly productive compared to traditional tools like plain old C++, Java, etc., but they are absolute behemoths when compared to Rebol. Virtually every other well known development tool in popular use is built upon bloated layers of existing technology, and encumbered by mainstream language syntax and development procedures which introduce an extraordinary volume of unnecessary complexity at many levels. Most developers have just never experienced the sort of self dependent architecture, lightweight tooling, bare language and data structure syntax, composability, and reduced code volume, which Rebol prioritizes as its most important purposes.

(Are Red/Rebol creators seriously claiming that Clojure's syntax is complex?)

Of course there are sometimes programs about which you could make grand claims, like when SQLite claims to be "35% Faster Than The Filesystem"[2], yet they also clearly describe its limitations[3].

Edit: Even in this thread we get this kind of praise:

> Isn't Red a great language to teach children? I just tried Red and it's amazingly simple to get started.[4]

About a year ago I did try out Red and Rebol, and I couldn't get any of the examples to work, or figure out what the syntax meant, because there's just so many cool examples of how few lines it takes to do X but very little explanation. It made me feel a bit inadequate, because if this language is soooo easy to use, and yet I somehow fail to grok it, then I'm just not smart enough, right?

Here's one of the examples linked to in Why Rebol and Red, with hardcoded IP, no comments and all:

    REBOL [title: "Live Camera Video Stream"]
    for i 2 27 1 [append b:[] rejoin [http://207.251.86.238/cctv i ".jpg"]]
    view w: layout [
      i: image 320x240  text-list 320x200 data b [forever [
        set-face i load value wait 1 if not viewed? w [unview break]
      ]]
    ]

It's great that someone found that so easy to write, but it looks like one-off write-only shell script, and is certainly not useful for "teaching children".

I know it might seem a bit harsh that I'm suggesting that Rebol/Red is being promoted in a somewhat dishonest way, but I'm mentioning this so that you could hopefully improve, not to make you upset.

Edit: More over-the-top praise.[5][6][7][8]

[0]: http://blog.hostilefork.com/rebol-vs-python-performance/

[1]: http://redprogramming.com/Why%20Rebol%20and%20Red.html

[2]: https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html

[3]: https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html (See the section Situations Where A Client/Server RDBMS May Work Better)

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18844770

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18844002

[6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18844185

[7]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18844746

[8]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18845102