That's all you need to know as business user except one more
thing: if ever your text contains any word containing "Red"
(red is ok) you must replace this string by "Red" (in a
future evolution, we'll do it for you.)
I'll update the documentation because it will confuse people.
Readable.red:
“The ReAdABLE Human Format aims at Agile Documentation by
making WRITING and READING document easier for End User
and Developer alike, while allowing a high degree of
flexibility.”
“Red’s ambitious goal is to build the world’s first
full-stack language, a language you can use from system
programming tasks, up to high-level scripting through DSL.
You've probably heard of the term "Full-Stack Developer".
But what is a full-stack Language, exactly?”Swift has this same stated goal. I guess ambition is good, but I really don't understand why you would try to make one tool handle such wildly different use cases. It's like me saying "my handheld electric jigsaw can be used from ripping full plywood sheets, up to cabinetry through luthiery". Well, sure, it can...but it's not actually good at more than one or two of those things.
The electric jigsaw example seems to illustrate the contrary of what you think it does because as technology advances it actually does make it possible for a tool to cover more use cases effectively. E.g. example an electric jigsaw covers more use cases than a manual hacksaw.
It’s possible to imagine a miniature drone with a high powered cutting laser that is controlled via an AR/VR interface that would be able to do anything from felling trees to cutting your fingernails. Obviously we’re some way off having that technology today.
But by analogy, it seems like we’re in a much better position to make programming languages that cover a broader and broader set of use cases, because we aren’t so constrained by materials science.
Why would you make one programming language to handle all of these cases? Surely there’s an incredibly strong case for that:
1. It makes more use cases accessible with less cognitive load. That’s pretty much the reason we have programming languages at all.
2. Investments in tooling etc. are magnified.
The term ‘Red’ is used as a contraction by the ‘Readable Human Format’.
It’s not clear to my why you think the previous title would be referring to a project other than the one that it linked to.
So at this stage for me, Red being in alpha stage (not even 1.0. yet and roadmap goes up to 2), you cannot use it like you would use nodejs. Tcp/ip has just being implemented, I hope to have something like async nodejs https server and an independant framework similar to express instead of full blown monolitic server but I don't know what the future will be.
But it is very usable for meta-programming stuff. readable.red is only one brick, I have other projects which will use red to generate code easily in other programming languages in much more friendly way that traditional DSL made for PHD people only ;)
However, GUI is not the main point of Red, just a part of it. IMO the really special thing is it's ability to create and use dialects (DSLs) very easily, so the 1 MB package can handle tasks from device drivers, through GUI, to natural language processing, with specialized dialects (DSLs).
Also could you elaborate what's so special about an DSL if all of these are locked into a specific syntax (or does the almighty red also include some super-easy grammar-description tools?)
The actual title is "Getting started with ReAdable Human Format".