Here’s the Deal

LiveScript vs Red

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When comparing LiveScript vs Red, the Slant community recommends Red for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” Red is ranked 57th while LiveScript is ranked 67th. The most important reason people chose Red is:

Other languages have complex, multi-step setups that beginners often get stuck on. Red has no installer, no setup, no dependencies*, just a single small (~1MB) command-line executable with both the compiler and repl. On Windows, you don't even have to launch executable from the command line--it has a GUI-console.

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What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?

Pros

Pro
Designed for High-level functional code

LiveScript has terse syntax for common functional operations like map, and ships with a library, prelude.ls, with many of the functions most commonly used by functional programmers.

Pro
Good amount of programmer flexibility

There's a huge range of features that can make common tasks faster.

Pro
ECMA 6 Features

It is the declared goal of LiveScript’s creators to track ECMAScript 6. Hence, the language gives you ECMAScript 6 plus type annotations (which are optional).

LiveScript's module syntax is currently a bit behind the ECMAScript 6 specification (something that will be fixed eventually). It supports two module standards: CJS (Node.js) and AMD (RequireJS).

Pro
Fixes coffeescript scoping issues

= is used to declare variables in the current scope, in order to redeclare variables of outer scope := is used. This way bugs are reduced.

Pro
Supported by WebStorm and Visual Studio

Pro
Simple toolchain

Pro
Very simple syntax

Red syntax is a lot like Rebol. It's easier than most languages for beginners to pick up.

Pro
Both low and high-level

Red has low enough access to do systems programming, but it's expressive enough for high-level scripting.

Pro
Low cognitive load

Red has very simple syntax that's easy to learn. It gets out of your way and lets you think about the problem instead, enhancing productivity.

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Cons

Con
Strong functional lean

LiveScript is designed to be a high level functional language. For people who prefer a more imperative approach it can be hard to get used to.

Con
Compiles to unreadable javascript

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