Getting started with Readable Human Format

Getting started with Readable Human Format(readable.red)

44 points by readabledotred 7 years ago | 33 comments

anamexis 7 years ago |

  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 "&#82;ed" (in a 
  future evolution, we'll do it for you.)

..but why? I don't know anything about Red or this, but why on earth?

fwip 7 years ago | |

My guess is it's related to Step 2 on their page, "add inline code to generate output or create a build script." The markup for that seems to start with "Red []"

readabledotred 7 years ago | |

Red [] is the header, It shouldn't behave like this for just Red, I'll raise an issue, so for now you have to be carefull about that though if you don't write tutorials on Red the probability should be low. In the future, I'll make that replacement automatically as I doubt it will be fixed soon if ever the core team will do it.

readabledotred 7 years ago | |

Oh I forget to say, actually you don't need to replace if you won't run a Red on the html script which I do through what I call html proxy https://redlang.red/html-proxy

I'll update the documentation because it will confuse people.

rebolek 7 years ago | |

This is project done in Red and it's a limitation of that project, not of Red language.

azhenley 7 years ago |

A recent HN discussion about the Red language that is helpful if you don't know much about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18843544

zepto 7 years ago | |

This is not the same language.

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-lang.org:

  “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?”

wool_gather 7 years ago | | |

> a language you can use from system programming tasks, up to high-level scripting through DSL

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.

readabledotred 7 years ago | | |

Yes it is isn't a language it is a format which uses Red as natural processing engine, like json uses javascript language as its format.

azhenley 7 years ago | | |

The previous title was referring to Red, which is the same Red that I linked to.

zfdrdg 7 years ago | |

I think this is a different red language.

azhenley 7 years ago | | |

No, it is the same. This article says to install from red-lang.org (which is what my link discusses).

fock 7 years ago | |

and I still don't get what's so special about it compared to the bunch of other embeddable languages (Lua, Tcl/Tk (which is 16MB in a batteries included package, mature, and shows why building a platform independent GUI into your language just doesn't age well)

readabledotred 7 years ago | | |

I'm language agnostic, I don't care much about them, I just wants to get things done. Red have features that ease things like its unique parse engine https://redlang.red/parse-html which avoid regex headache (recently javascript recognized the problem and tried to add methods to ease parsing it's far from being as elegant as red. I don't remember the research paper from which Carl Sessenrath inspired fromn but it is clearly closer to natural language processing, though still not close enough in my opinion so I'm working on making a dialect that would almost feel the gap and allows anybody to create its own AI for example ;)

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 ;)

rebolek 7 years ago | | |

16MB is >10x more than Red (batteries included) and also Red takes different approach to GUI - it's platform independent but with OS widgets - so it ages with OS, unlike custom solution.

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).

tomcam 7 years ago |

I love the Red language. I think this is an interesting experiment – and I’m not trying to be mean here – I found the page difficult to read. But I hope the OT continues on this path.

shusson 7 years ago | |

Yeah same, I find `ReAdABLE` unpleasant to read.

ryukoposting 7 years ago |

I've been working on something loosely related as a side project. It's a turing-complete lisp DSL that's made for generating HTML and CSS. Kind of like a scripting language that was made for the sole purpose of CGI scripts.

HocusLocus 7 years ago |

I like the priddy colors on black background, it makes me feel hacky while I'm learning a new way to do hack stuff.

azhenley 7 years ago |

> What you can do with Red language

The actual title is "Getting started with ReAdable Human Format".

fock 7 years ago | |

And apparently this is some kind of Red-based markup language. So it's technically something you can do with Red. Still not that exciting.

readabledotred 7 years ago | | |

I didn't do it for being exciting, I did it for being usefull like for documentation which is a nightmare in big corps projects where they invest dozens of millions euros each which 50% are wasted to wander though code trying to trace back to business requirements ;)