Red, Rebol & Carl

Another goal of our trip in California was to visit Carl Sassenrath, creator of Rebol, and spiritual grandfather of Red, as Red is the offspring of the Rebol language.

We had a great time with Carl and his wife Cindy, discussing Red and Rebol syntax & semantics, the blockchain industry, smart contracts and the opportunities it presents for our technologies, while enjoying a good Italian restaurant and excellent red wine (selected by Carl, of course!). Carl was particularly interested in understanding more deeply how smart contracts work and how they are currently implemented using the Solidity language. We walked him through the complete source code of the RED token contract, commenting on pretty much every line of code in it and discussing the needs and possible improvements a DSL like Red/C3 could bring over the existing tools. It seems obvious that we could make a huge difference in that domain, given our human-centric approach to software building.

Another aspect that got Carl's attention, was the tokenomics we are setting up for our community of users, using the RED token. Carl read the whole whitepaper (he found it well-written), and was excited by how we could make the community grow, delegate more control over the projects to the community using the voting power, and increase the contributions by leveraging the token, as a reward model for useful contributions.

We were invited to stay at Carl's place, as the discussions lasted late into the night (many thanks to Carl & Cindy for their kind hospitality). At our morning breakfast, we were delighted to hear that Carl accepted our invitation to join the Red Foundation as an honorary member, which means that Carl will be watching our work both on Red and on the Red/C3 DSL, bringing his unique experience and advice on building languages and dialects. As we are still setting up the Red Foundation operations and teams, we will give more information about our collaboration with Carl in later reports from the Foundation. In addition to that, we asked Carl to kindly free the Rebol/SDK (which is something Carl was already considering, as it is not sold anymore), so that Red users could encap their own toolchain binaries if they want to, without having to purchase it. Carl announced on rebol.com that it will soon be unlocked, and provided for free to all!

For the old timers from Red and Rebol community, yes, it means we are on a course to finally join forces and build the dream team we've all wished for over these many years! ;-)

Next article will cover the current state of the Red Foundation and the related on-going tasks.