I agree on RAD, but "history of being used in spreadsheet software" is a bit of an overstatement: there are Picosheet showcase [1] and one of the 7GUIs tasks [2] that are made with Red and implement bare-bone native spreadsheets in a handful of code, but that's pretty much it (AFAIK).
And no, Red is a general-purpose language, not specific to spreadsheets like TabulaScript, so your "similar enough" is quite misleading. This reminds of TreeSheets and Lobster [3] though.
I discovered Red (and its predecessor Rebol) a few months ago and was really excited about it - very interesting blend of ideas that seems to hit a sweet spot for GUI scripting. Then I discovered it doesn’t have 64-bit support and it seems the community is debating about whether it even should, as it would require a significant overhaul. This makes it a no-go at least for Mac users unfortunately.
> and it seems the community is debating about whether it even should as it would require a significant overhaul
It's true that Red supports 32-bit platforms only, but porting toolchain to 64-bit is a planned transition, which was never "debated about"; Catalina just forced this issue on most developers, including the Red team, and the actual question was if addressing it should come before all the other priorities, to the detriment of overall speed of development and release of major features.
Thanks for clarifying. I certainly didn’t mean to disparage Red at all - the language seems interesting and the project admirable. I’m really eager to dive in and explore, but I’m on Catalina so I can’t yet.
The debate thing was just the impression I came away with. Things like this post[0] from late 2018 saying
> We are currently 32-bit only, and need to decide the best path for adding 64-bit support, should we elect to do so.
(and some other back-and-forth I can’t find at the moment) left me thinking it was an open question. I’m glad to hear it’s on the roadmap.
IIRC it was said in the context of the next major release (0.6.5), i.e. concentrate on 64-bit support ASAP or instead focus on the planned milestones that were already in the pipes. As you said, there was back-and-worth discussion in community chat, where the team tried to gather some feedback from macOS developers and gain a perspective on how urgent this issue is.
Really unfortunate that you cannot give Red a try, but I think it's still worth checking out in a VM of your choice. Drop by one of the Gitter rooms if you need help to get started:
