Google is showing big interest in the Red programming language

The team behind the Red programming language, one of my personal favorite languages and I think the most interesting systems programming language out there today, has made a visit to San Francisco to attend the GoBlockchainConnect conference. As they describe in their blog, during their vist they met the creators of Monero, Litecoin and Neo, but also happened to meet a Google manager and a Google engineer leading Google's internal blockchain group, who were so interested in the Red language that they invited the Red team to do a talk at Google's HQ in Mountain View.

According to the blog post, the Red team accepted the invitation, and during their talk Google became increasingly interested in the domain specific language creation features of Red and how they are used to simplify creation of GUIs with Red, so they've invited them again to do a talk to an even bigger audience of Google employees.

I've written an article that uses a few animated GIFs to show how easily you can make GUIs with Red (easier than any other technology I've seen), so the interest is no surprise really. It's maybe more surprising that Google hasn't shown an interest before, because Red has been in development for about 7 years now and it's predecessor Rebol who had the same easy DSL and GUI creation ability is about two decades old.

Red had a hugely successful ICO launch earlier this year, so I wouldn't think they needed Google's support financially, so I'm not sure what will come of Google's sudden interest in the language, but it is still interesting to see that maybe one of the big players might now adopt either Red or maybe some of it's features for Google's own programming languages, Dart and Go. The Red team seems to see a lot of potential at least, in Google's interest specifically and Silicon Valley in general, and are now planning to open up an office in the San Francisco bay area as quickly as possible.

The blog post didn't go into many details about their meeting with Google, but Google usually puts the talks held at their HQ up on YouTube, so hopefully we'll be able to see the demo Red gave or the bigger one they were invited to do. I'll be sure to write about it if they do.