3 ms·
I'm reminded of vrml. That was in the 90s. Back then I expected more by now.
by accnumnplus1 8y ago
I'm reminded of vrml. That was in the 90s. Back then I expected more by now.
- specialist 8y agoWe did get more. And less. Many of the innovations of VRML-97 have been forgotten, ready to be rediscovered. But progress on other fronts has been amazing. Mostly the notion of treating your entire app as a simulation, just like games do. VRML-97's event loop, warts and all, made things a lot easier. VRML-97 also had a true prototype/instance class system, way more like David Unger's Self language than what we have today. (Ironically, JavaScript is moving away from prototypes and more towards classes each iteration. Too bad.) Scene graphs, of course. Really just a DSL for describing object graphs. Very succinct & powerful. A few things deflected VRML-97. Sun placed their bets on Java3D and ignored OpenGL. In addition to scene graphs, Java3D had the notion of live (active) objects, sending messages to each other. It was the 90s, people still bought into OO. It was an idea worth exploring that didn't pan out. No shame in trying. The bigger mistake was the VRML steering committee went all in for XML and switched to Web3D. Completely stopped all the hard earned momentum. Classic example of Joel Spolsky's "Don't Rewrite" rule. This idea was not worth exploring. Source: Implemented VRML-97 browser, wrote some games and authoring tools, coauthored the original JavaGL bindings with "Alligator Descartes", lobbied Sun & SGI for years to drop Java3D and promote JavaGL (which they eventually did, but too late).