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May be it would have been more popular to make the bolder move of using Smalltalk. At least, this choice would have been more sustainable than Objective-C, whi

May be it would have been more popular to make the bolder move of using Smalltalk. At least, this choice would have been more sustainable than Objective-C, which has to be replaced now by Swift. Swift is not bad, apart for the botched argument list syntax; do it smalltalk-like like in Objective-C or indeed Smalltalk, or do it algol-like, but this mix is ugly! Or of course, to just use Lisp, because let's remember that 95% of the success of NeXTstep was due to the Interface Builder which was just an Objective-C rewrite of a Lisp program!

pjmlp 8y ago
I guess the bold move would have been to have kept Dylan around. :)
- protomyth 8y ago
  I do sometimes wonder what a Cocoa framework would look like for Dylan. It might be really interesting given Dylan’s capabilities.
- klibertp 8y ago
  For those interested, Dylan was a language with semantics close to Scheme, with object system inspired heavily by Lisp CLOS (with multiple inheritance and multiple dispatch), with infix, non-sexp-based syntax (kind of Lua-like), but also with pattern-based hygienic macros. Honestly, just reading that list of features should be enough to get anyone interested, it died because the company behind it went out of business IIRC, which is a shame. It still exists, is on life support over at https://opendylan.org/index.html https://opendylan.org/index.html - without a dedicated IDE and up-to-date windowing library it's a bit unwieldy, and it lacks something like 20 years of performance optimizations that went into other compilers, but it still works. And, even now, its linguistic features are way ahead of Java; it would be easier to compare it with Scala rather than Java - and it was like that in '95. Well, it feels more like an exhibit in a museum now rather than a real, workable tool - but at least it's preserved in this form, so there's still hope that someone will step in and revitalize it...
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Also the Dylan team at Apple even though they already knew about their death sentence, went ahead and finalized their NewtonOS implementation ahead of the team redoing it in C++. There was a comment from one of their team members a couple of years ago here in HN. I think Julia and Swift both have a bit of Dylan on their souls. :) EDIT: Found the Dylan post with comments from the Newton team. Search for entries from wrs and mikelevins. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106802
pankajdoharey 8y ago
The thing is all of this is still possible even today on GNUStep and Etoile because they have Dynamic language runtimes, compiler people have to replace the runtime part with Objc runtime. And you can use Smalltalk or Lisp etc ..

pjmlp 8y ago

I guess the bold move would have been to have kept Dylan around. :)

protomyth 8y ago
I do sometimes wonder what a Cocoa framework would look like for Dylan. It might be really interesting given Dylan’s capabilities.
klibertp 8y ago
For those interested, Dylan was a language with semantics close to Scheme, with object system inspired heavily by Lisp CLOS (with multiple inheritance and multiple dispatch), with infix, non-sexp-based syntax (kind of Lua-like), but also with pattern-based hygienic macros. Honestly, just reading that list of features should be enough to get anyone interested, it died because the company behind it went out of business IIRC, which is a shame. It still exists, is on life support over at https://opendylan.org/index.html https://opendylan.org/index.html - without a dedicated IDE and up-to-date windowing library it's a bit unwieldy, and it lacks something like 20 years of performance optimizations that went into other compilers, but it still works. And, even now, its linguistic features are way ahead of Java; it would be easier to compare it with Scala rather than Java - and it was like that in '95. Well, it feels more like an exhibit in a museum now rather than a real, workable tool - but at least it's preserved in this form, so there's still hope that someone will step in and revitalize it...
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Also the Dylan team at Apple even though they already knew about their death sentence, went ahead and finalized their NewtonOS implementation ahead of the team redoing it in C++. There was a comment from one of their team members a couple of years ago here in HN. I think Julia and Swift both have a bit of Dylan on their souls. :) EDIT: Found the Dylan post with comments from the Newton team. Search for entries from wrs and mikelevins. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106802

pankajdoharey 8y ago

The thing is all of this is still possible even today on GNUStep and Etoile because they have Dynamic language runtimes, compiler people have to replace the runtime part with Objc runtime. And you can use Smalltalk or Lisp etc ..