Most developers know a small number of programming languages. In reality, the world of programming languages is by no means static and indeed, in recent years, it has become even more exciting. The birth of a new language programming can be motivated by several factors: to simplify software development, making the programming process more efficient and productive; to address specific problems (some languages prove better suited for scientific computing, image processing, artificial intelligence, or web programming); to improve the readability and understanding of the code; to maximize performance; to meet specific industry needs.
The example of the Red programming language: what it is and what it is for
In the last period there is a lot of talk about the programming language Red. It’s about scripting languagecompiled and object-oriented that itself grew out of Rebol (Relative Expression Based Object Language). It was created with the goal of being simple, flexible, and readable while providing a concise and expressive programming experience.
Invented in 2011 by Nenad Rakočević, the Red language is today starting to become more popular due to the fact that it is rapidly approaching its first stable versionexpected by the end of 2023.
Red combines characteristics of several programming paradigms: functional, imperative and object-oriented. It features a dynamic type system and supports automatic type detection. One of Red’s defining characteristics is its compact syntax and minimalist, which focuses on the essentials and tries to keep code verbosity to a minimum.
Verbosity is the Europen translation (although not exactly happy) of the English term verbosity: with reference to programming code, verbosity is the amount of lines needed to express a certain logic or functionality. Verbose code has more words, syntax, or structures than more concise code.
Red language is highly port and can run on a variety of platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more. It also offers an implementation called Red/Systema subset of Red optimized for performance and low-level programming.
The main advantages of the Red language
Red is designed to be versatile and can be used for a variety of applications, such as desktop, web and mobile application development, scripting, automation, data processing and more. It is easy to learn and features a practical approach to programming.
Among the main ones characteristics of Red there is definitely the simplicity and conciseness: it has a clean syntax and readable, which makes it easier to write code and understand the program.
Red, moreover, is flexible offering a wide range of integrated functions to manipulate data and manage control flows. As mentioned above, in the case of Red la typing And dynamics: this means that the variables they do not require an explicit type declaration, and thus typing is handled dynamically during program execution.
The language makes available to every developer a standard library feature-rich: includes modules for interacting with the operating system, manipulating files, networking, and much more.
The programmer doesn’t have to worry about freeing up memory because Red uses a system of garbage collection integrated which greatly simplifies the work. In addition, it provides a JIT compiler which translates Red code into machine code for optimized performance. In another article we have seen what the machine code and the differences between compilation and interpretation.