[9214]

Don't be so narrow-minded.

Buzzwords and cryptocurrencies speculations aside, Red is really worth checking, at least if you're a language enthusiast and is interested in Forth and Lisp family.

And here blockchain is nothing more than an innovative (yet rather controversial, I agree, since I'm skeptical too) model to sustain programming language community and gain a solid ground for core developing team.

[dragonwriter]

Red has potential, but certainly has had slow progress; shifting focus to blockchain may increase total resources but even if it does it mostly likely means slowing down progress outside of the new focal domain.

So, I can see it legitimately killing interest at the margins for those not specifically not interested in blockchain-focussed programming.

[9214]

This is a valid concern.

As I understood from my discussion with Nenad (lead developer), making such move was a hard decision to make. On the one hand, it MAY actually pay-off in a long term for whole language ecosystem overall, but on the other hand, for that we need to pay the price of slower development and releases delays.

To answer another point (if I understand it correctly) - you don't really need to be interested in blockchains and stuff (personally I don't) to participate in community and programming with Red, there's lots of other things to play with (metaprogramming, language-oriented programming, reactive programming, data-driven programming, parsing, DSL and eDSLs, baking cross-platform GUIs, system programming with Red/System).

[dmitriid]

> it mostly likely means slowing down progress outside of the new focal domain.

IIRC, at the end of last year they promised 1.0 by the end of this year.

Then they missed a 0.6.x release by four months. Now they don't even talk about a 1.0 and even minor releases no longer have a due date [1]

So yes, all these additional endeavours will definitely slow an already slow progress to a halt.

I also wonder if they finally fully implemented integers and floats...

[1] https://github.com/red/red/milestones

[ZenoArrow]

> "IIRC, at the end of last year they promised 1.0 by the end of this year."

To be honest, I don't think that was ever a realistic goal, even when it was set. The only benefit of setting such a goal ahead of when a clear release date can be determined is in keeping up momentum during the awkward middle phase of language maturity, when key functionality is clearly missing but you want to maintain interest. This isn't just a Red thing, it's fairly common.

If I had to guess, even by the end of next year, it's much more likely we'll be looking at a 0.7.x release (or, best case, 0.8.x) rather than 1.0. The good news is that the language is likely to be generally useful around 0.7.x (assuming the roadmap is stuck to), as that's the point when the network I/O features are being implemented.