2 ms·

Conveniently, I already wrote an article to answer those first couple of questions. :) http://waltersmith.us/newton/SELF%20and%20the%20Origins%20of%20NewtonScr

by wrs 7y ago

Conveniently, I already wrote an article to answer those first couple of questions. :) http://waltersmith.us/newton/SELF%20and%20the%20Origins%20of%20NewtonScript.pdf http://waltersmith.us/newton/SELF%20and%20the%20Origins%20of... Io is interesting to me as a sort of alternative universe version of NewtonScript. In this universe, I’m a little smarter, a little more self-confident, and I have a little more time. :) It has a strong opinion on simplicity, like Self or Smalltalk, whereas I compromised on that a bit to try to make the language seem more familiar to programmers of the Apple languages at the time, notably Pascal. It also has 100% more thought given to concurrency! Apple was one of the originators of Unicode, so it was pretty obvious we would use it. However, we made the same mistake as Windows NT, Java, and JavaScript (and, to be fair, Unicode itself!) in thinking 16 bits would be enough and using UTF-16 to simplify the string API. Unlike the others, Newton OS didn’t survive long enough to hit that problem, though.

imglorp 7y ago
How did Dylan figure into all this? Did the platform vision include a number of environments or was the aim to arrive at one good dynamic one?
- wrs 7y ago
  Well, although I worked on both of them, they really had nothing to do with each other. To oversimplify, there was the “Senior” Newton project that was the outgrowth of what was going on when I joined in 1988 and would have been Dylan-based, and the “Junior” Newton project that I switched to in 1992 (?) to make a smaller, less capable, but faster-shipping product. Junior hardware was so much smaller that we had to do essentially a whole new architecture, which ended up having NewtonScript as the app language. Had Senior shopped there would have been a compatibility later (presumably including a Dylan version of NewtonScript), but we didn’t get that far before Senior was eventually discontinued and everyone focused on Junior.

by wrs 7y ago

imglorp 7y ago

How did Dylan figure into all this? Did the platform vision include a number of environments or was the aim to arrive at one good dynamic one?

wrs 7y ago
Well, although I worked on both of them, they really had nothing to do with each other. To oversimplify, there was the “Senior” Newton project that was the outgrowth of what was going on when I joined in 1988 and would have been Dylan-based, and the “Junior” Newton project that I switched to in 1992 (?) to make a smaller, less capable, but faster-shipping product. Junior hardware was so much smaller that we had to do essentially a whole new architecture, which ended up having NewtonScript as the app language. Had Senior shopped there would have been a compatibility later (presumably including a Dylan version of NewtonScript), but we didn’t get that far before Senior was eventually discontinued and everyone focused on Junior.