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Ask HN: Does the Easel programming language still exist?
Does the Easel programming language still exist and is it supported? I’m just curious, because I worked with it in 1994 at Sears. The last I’ve heard very few people supported it at the company that owned it.
It was event driven but not object oriented. By that I mean, code was executed based on responses from a control like a push button or when text was entered in a text area. You would have click responses to a button that would execute code written for that button. That’s why it was considered event driven. It wasn’t object oriented because it didn’t have classes. We used it for a marketing system at Sears for many years and I was wondering if the language still existed.
- oneplane 5y agoSeems like an autohotkeys-type of programming combined with MS Access. The 'low code' solution of the day?
- GrinningFool 5y agoNot really, it was used for ground-up development of new solutions, particularly as middleware between the user and mainframe systems. It marketed itself as part of the 'rapid application development' trend of the time, in that it let you create UIs pretty quickly using their tooling - but it always came down to code in order to implement anything useful.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ianbicking 5y agoI'd like to read this as a missed connection ad: Me: young, new to the professional world, making my way around a new environment at Sears in 1994. You: an shy but engaging language, event driven, with a style that was new and exciting for that time and place. It's been a long time but I still think about you whenever I write addEventListener. Would love to reconnect, even if only to share some memories of that time.
- weatherlight 5y agoThis made me smile :)
- ericwood 5y agoIs this what you're talking about? I don't have any other information but was able to track this down: https://web.archive.org/web/20020102154718/https://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/reuse/packages/easel.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020102154718/https://www.resea...
- williamscales 5y agoGoing off of that, I was able to find: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/vhll/fowler.enduser.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
- generalpf 5y agoWawanesa Insurance in Canada still uses it.
- dang 5y agoA handful of past HN comments mention it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16631346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16631346 (March 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362115 (April 2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030798 (Jan 2014) The 2018 comment links to https://www.eslsyndetic.com/Documentation/overview_of_responses_and_their_uses.html https://www.eslsyndetic.com/Documentation/overview_of_respon.... From there I got to https://web.archive.org/web/20030220213927/http://www.eslsyndetic.com/html/overview.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20030220213927/http://www.eslsyn..., which makes it clear that Easel was renamed ESL and https://www.eslsyndetic.com https://www.eslsyndetic.com is indeed its current incarnation. I guess that means it still exists.
- weatherlight 5y agolooks absolutely archaic. ESL is the world's most comprehensive development tool for easily connecting all of your current and legacy systems and presenting your users with an integrated and easy to use windows program. The latest versions of ESL are available to all of our customers with a support contract and are also available for a 30 day evaluation.
- zhte415 5y agoNot doubting it's dated, but that description exactly fits a lot of enterprise stuff today.
- duskwuff 5y agoThere are a few screenshots at: https://www.eslsyndetic.com/overview.htm https://www.eslsyndetic.com/overview.htm And it looks very dated -- old-style MDI interface and controls, System font everywhere, bare-bones interface... the discussion of "5250 and 3270 host sessions" doesn't exactly speak to its modernity either.
- Aeolun 5y agoIf it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. I assume all the people still using that language don’t give a whit about looks.
- ChrisLomont 5y agoI worked at Sears in 92 and was tasked with evaluating Easel for the Promotional Marketing System, Steve Marchi's group. I recommended no. Sears went full in. I quit to write games, then to grad school. Easel and PMS went on for years. Eventually all my friends there quit. You gave me PTSD :)
- jschwar313 5y agoYea, I joined the marketing systems in '94 and it was called PMI then, Promotional Marketing Integration.
- ChrisLomont 5y agoThe PMS name didn't last long. It was a running joke on the project when it started :) The best part of working at Sears was 92 was in the Sears Tower, and somehow noob me got a window office on the 46th floor overlooking Lake Michigan. On a clear day I could see the MI shores on the other side. It also gave me a lifelong aversion to working for big companies - too slow, too out of date.
- lamg 5y agoNo it doesn't. It vanished from the known Universe and now we have no idea on how it looked before.
- james-redwood 5y agoI know a guy who used to work with it but no clue. I guess something like Delphi might be the closest thing to it today
- GrinningFool 5y agoI've worked with it at two companies - a finserv company in Eastern US through '96 where it was basically just an interface to the COBOL systems running on the mainframe, and IBM's ImagePlus via a C wrapper. Then into the early 2000s at FirstUSA/BankOne/Chase, where it powered their card services CRM system. This application had a metric ton of business logic, and tied together DB2, 3270 scraping via custom C executable, ImagePlus for viewing customer letters and correspondence history (also brokered via custom C executable), and a few other systems. We eventually replaced with with a C++/MFC application on Windows backed by CORBA services in a massive port effort. For a very long time the new application was a much worse experience than the original. Easel was commonly used in OS/2 financial shops (both of the above fit that category) with heavy mainframe integration. I would have to assume there are /some/ legacy users still kicking around, but the last I knew of were a few Boston-area companies phasing it out also in the early 2000s. Around that time, consultancy rates for the language started to go way up as domain expertise was pretty rare. Easel's 'block' style (I don't remember exactly what it was called) for accepting input from external systems was the first time I ran into anything like the pattern matching I next saw in Erlang. I enjoyed working with Easel - it presented a reasonable abstraction for GUI creation and interaction, was easy to integrate, and the event model made a lot of sense. It was also obtuse and sometimes painful to use, but no more so than any other language (then or now). I started doing a little digging when I saw this article, and came across this in Jeff Sutherland's "The Scrum Handbook" [1] Scrum has risen from being a method used by a number of enthusiasts at the Easel Corporation in 1993, to one of the world’s most popular and well-known frameworks for development of software. The continued expansion of the global rollout of Scrum is testimony to the fact that Scrum delivers on its promise. And The first Scrum team was created at Easel Corporation in 1993 by Dr. Jeff Sutherland (the author of this manual) and the Scrum framework was formalized in 1995 by Ken Schwaber. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301685699_Jeff_Sutherland's_Scrum_Handbook https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301685699_Jeff_Suth...
- GrinningFool 5y agoIn a HN comment around 2014 I referred to it as 'kludgy and annoying to code for, but ahead of its time'. It's funny how time has sort of reversed the order of those two attributes in my memory.