SAsamatman·Oct 5, 2024
My impression was a rather shallow one, between the language getting better and my understanding why it looks and acts the way it does, I'd say my change of heart is 20% the former and 80% the latter.
The reasons I think something new would do well are things Tcl can't fix. Examples: leading zero octal, 0 is false, 1 is true, and it just... Tcl has a face only a mother could love.
I've been interested in Red for years now without trying it out. It's very high-concept and sort of... totalizing? in a way which seems maybe unfocused. It is admittedly quite clean on the page, and there are some solid ideas there, one of these days I'll take it for a drive. One quibble is they need to stop punting to Rebol and write native documentation, being told that Red is "90% compatible" with another language no one uses, and getting shelled out to the
Read the rest
documentation of that language, is not a great way to keep the funnel intact. But you have to, this is where the "official documentation" link sends you: https://github.com/red/docs/blob/master/en/SUMMARY.adoc
That, combined with the "Red is all things to all people!" messaging, gives me the (perhaps unfair) impression that I would run into dusty corners and sharp edges fairly quickly if I tried to cash in the Ultimate Programming Language promise. Just finish up the docs, folks. Only have to do it once.
I don't think it fits the new command language vision, however, because bare words are evaluated. In Tcl, the first word is special, and it's a command, everything else is strings unless you want to substitute in another string (or what have you). That strikes me as essential for this niche, notably this is how shell works and it's tough to imagine a usable shell which didn't work that way.
But talk is cheap and a language implementation is very, very expensive. If I needed to add a command language to a program, I'd use Tcl and call it a day.