[7thaccount]

For those that haven't used Rebol or Red. It is a homoiconic language like lisp, but no s-expressions as I understand it.

Rebol is really nice with a lot of built-in primitives that make it super useful although Rebol is kind of dead now (some users exist, but no new versions in a while). Red is being worked on and if it ever reaches 1.0 could be a game changer.

I think it is pretty easy to build little DSLs, but I don't think macros are super easy unless I'm mistaken. If somebody could shed some light for me I'd appreciate it.

[9214]

You don't need macros in Red (but it's easy to roll out your own macro layer, if one so desires [1]), all code transformations can be achieved at runtime. A brief explanation of how this works is given in [2].

As for Red / Rebol vs. Racket content - I wrote an excessive post on that some time ago [3], in response to similar question.

TL;DR from language creation perspective is that Racket has state-of-the-art macro system and all the necessary infrastructure, and Red has metaDSL (that is, DSL for creating DSLs) called Parse [4], which is basically PEG on steroids (think OMeta) + a different take on homoiconicity, compared to Lisps, which, most of the time, renders custom readers and tokenizers unnecessary.

[1]: https://www.red-lang.org/2016/12/entering-world-of-macros.ht...

[2]: https://github.com/red/red/wiki/%5BNOTES%5D-How-Red-Works---...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/redlang/comments/aebxct/contrast_re...

[4]: https://www.red-lang.org/2013/11/041-introducing-parse.html