4 ms·

Open Dylan

60 points by ofrzeta 2y ago

Neywiny 2y ago
I'll say this because it's possible to go from my username to name anyway: I share a name with this language. And usually that's fine because it's not very widely used. But seeing this headline was certainly a surprise on an otherwise calm Sunday morning.
- postepowanieadm 2y ago
  Open is quite uncommon name nowadays!
  - Neywiny 2y ago
    My parents are kinda progressive. My brothers Close and Finalize aren't as... Open to it
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > I share a name with this language. Amusingly, Bob Dylan sued Apple for trademark infringement. https://www.storiesofapple.net/dylan-sues-apple.html https://www.storiesofapple.net/dylan-sues-apple.html
  - drowntoge 2y ago
    You beat me to it! Old enough to remember reading about this in the tech press back in the day.
  - hoistbypetard 2y ago
    At least they came to an agreement instead of just renaming it "Butt-Head Musician" https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-mac-7100-lands-apple-hot-water-carl-sagan https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-mac-7100-...
  - Neywiny 2y ago
    Maybe this is why I despise Apple products so much? (Though I'm not named after Bob Dylan)
  - cafard 2y ago
    Steve Jobs should have offered to rename it to Zimmerman. I never heard of Dylan Thomas's estate threatening legal action against Bob Dylan.
dahart 2y ago
I’m curious - what is Dylan really for? Who should use it, and in what situations? I totally could have missed something obvious, but I read through the intro and the ‘Tour’, and it has a lot of detail about what the language is, but not much on when and where to use it. The closest thing seems to be it’s LISP but faster? What are the reasons to choose Dylan over C++, Swift, JavaScript, or Python?
- patrec 2y ago
  Dylan is simply a historical curio, so there are no situations in which anyone should use it apart to study programming language history and to take inspiration from roads not taken. It's basically Common Lisp, with Algol-like syntax, less historical baggage (everything is a class, no weird stuff like prog and so and so forth) and more emphasis on efficient implementation. Unfortunately, it didn't catch on, but it's IMO a nicer language than python (which modelled inheritance rules on Dylan), Java, Javascript or C++. Here are some interesting things about it: 1. It has an simple but nice trick for avoiding ugly_underscores: a-b is a single symbol, a - b is subtraction. 2. IIRC it was the first non-sexp language with a sophisticated macro system. 3. Like Common Lisp it has multi-methods and resumable exceptions (but unlikely Common Lisp all exceptions are resumable). If you want to play around with either multi methods and resumable exceptions, Common Lisp or Dylan are probably your best bets and Dylan has the advantage of being probably simpler to pick up.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Some of the Dylan's ideas live on Julia, though. Which has had a good adoption story thus far. https://info.juliahub.com/case-studies https://info.juliahub.com/case-studies
    - patrec 2y ago
      Great point – I should definitely have mentioned Julia as your best bet for playing around with multi-methods. I think it's basically the only language with any eco-system to speak of that has them. Julia also happens to be the only extant language I'm aware of that has a well designed shell interpolation syntax. For resumable exceptions, however, playing around with Dylan or CL remains your best bet, as far as I'm aware of (and Common Lisp at least also integrates them into the interactive development experience).
NeutralForest 2y ago
Looks fun!
- postepowanieadm 2y ago
  Makes one wonder why it didn't succeeded.
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    It wasn't ready in time for the product it was primarily intended to support, the Apple Newton, which was itself a flop in the market. If it had finished in time and the Newton hadn't been a flop, it could have been like Objective-C's move in the market with iOS (and earlier with NeXT and OS X but that was still pretty small compared to what iOS did to the language's popularity). A language buoyed by a popular platform. But that didn't happen.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Actually the Dylan group finished the prototype earlier than the C++ group, on the internal competition between both groups, but apparently politis won. There are some old posts on HN from Newton team folks.
      - wrs 2y ago
        It’s a bit more complicated than that! Among other things, it wouldn’t have fit in the machine (the first Newton device had 128k of RAM).
  - NeutralForest 2y ago
    I don't know the story but why does a language ever fail? Lack of good tooling support, lack of buy-in from large projects, lack of use-cases, crowded market, etc. Not only does every new language (at the time) need to have similar ergonomics to the existing landscape, they also need compelling features to escape the inertia that keeps developers within one ecosystem.
mdaniel 2y ago
> The canonical "Hello World" program in Dylan. // File library.dylan: Module: dylan-user define library hello use dylan; use io, import: { format-out }; end; define module hello use dylan; use format-out; end; // File hello.dylan: Module: hello format-out("Hello!\n"); Give me a break, that is the most insane hello world I have very seen in my life, and I've seen brainfuck. The idea that one must also `use dylan;` in every file in a language named dylan is just stupid, going the extra mile to appear to the untrained eye to be an unused import since the next line is the import that actually matters
- v9v 2y ago
  I'm assuming that the "use dylan" is there for similar reasons as to why you declare that a package uses :cl in common lisp: This way if you want to define your own functions that replace those in the language (eg. a custom + function) then you can simply omit importing the dylan namespace and define those without worry of conflicts.
emorning3 2y ago
I remember Apple giving away Dylan CDs when Java was first released. I learned them both and went with Java. But I should have taken the opportunity to also learn the Common Lisp Object System. These days we like to bitch about OOP languages, but we could have had better.
brian-armstrong 2y ago
Was a bit dissapointed this wasn't a free model for generating Bob Dylan songs, honestly

60 points by ofrzeta 2y ago

I'll say this because it's possible to go from my username to name anyway: I share a name with this language. And usually that's fine because it's not very widely used. But seeing this headline was certainly a surprise on an otherwise calm Sunday morning.

postepowanieadm 2y ago
Open is quite uncommon name nowadays!
- Neywiny 2y ago
  My parents are kinda progressive. My brothers Close and Finalize aren't as... Open to it
andsoitis 2y ago
> I share a name with this language. Amusingly, Bob Dylan sued Apple for trademark infringement. https://www.storiesofapple.net/dylan-sues-apple.html https://www.storiesofapple.net/dylan-sues-apple.html
- drowntoge 2y ago
  You beat me to it! Old enough to remember reading about this in the tech press back in the day.
- hoistbypetard 2y ago
  At least they came to an agreement instead of just renaming it "Butt-Head Musician" https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-mac-7100-lands-apple-hot-water-carl-sagan https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-mac-7100-...
- Neywiny 2y ago
  Maybe this is why I despise Apple products so much? (Though I'm not named after Bob Dylan)
- cafard 2y ago
  Steve Jobs should have offered to rename it to Zimmerman. I never heard of Dylan Thomas's estate threatening legal action against Bob Dylan.

dahart 2y ago

I’m curious - what is Dylan really for? Who should use it, and in what situations? I totally could have missed something obvious, but I read through the intro and the ‘Tour’, and it has a lot of detail about what the language is, but not much on when and where to use it. The closest thing seems to be it’s LISP but faster? What are the reasons to choose Dylan over C++, Swift, JavaScript, or Python?

patrec 2y ago
Dylan is simply a historical curio, so there are no situations in which anyone should use it apart to study programming language history and to take inspiration from roads not taken. It's basically Common Lisp, with Algol-like syntax, less historical baggage (everything is a class, no weird stuff like prog and so and so forth) and more emphasis on efficient implementation. Unfortunately, it didn't catch on, but it's IMO a nicer language than python (which modelled inheritance rules on Dylan), Java, Javascript or C++. Here are some interesting things about it: 1. It has an simple but nice trick for avoiding ugly_underscores: a-b is a single symbol, a - b is subtraction. 2. IIRC it was the first non-sexp language with a sophisticated macro system. 3. Like Common Lisp it has multi-methods and resumable exceptions (but unlikely Common Lisp all exceptions are resumable). If you want to play around with either multi methods and resumable exceptions, Common Lisp or Dylan are probably your best bets and Dylan has the advantage of being probably simpler to pick up.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Some of the Dylan's ideas live on Julia, though. Which has had a good adoption story thus far. https://info.juliahub.com/case-studies https://info.juliahub.com/case-studies
  - patrec 2y ago
    Great point – I should definitely have mentioned Julia as your best bet for playing around with multi-methods. I think it's basically the only language with any eco-system to speak of that has them. Julia also happens to be the only extant language I'm aware of that has a well designed shell interpolation syntax. For resumable exceptions, however, playing around with Dylan or CL remains your best bet, as far as I'm aware of (and Common Lisp at least also integrates them into the interactive development experience).

NeutralForest 2y ago

Looks fun!

postepowanieadm 2y ago
Makes one wonder why it didn't succeeded.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  It wasn't ready in time for the product it was primarily intended to support, the Apple Newton, which was itself a flop in the market. If it had finished in time and the Newton hadn't been a flop, it could have been like Objective-C's move in the market with iOS (and earlier with NeXT and OS X but that was still pretty small compared to what iOS did to the language's popularity). A language buoyed by a popular platform. But that didn't happen.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Actually the Dylan group finished the prototype earlier than the C++ group, on the internal competition between both groups, but apparently politis won. There are some old posts on HN from Newton team folks.
    - wrs 2y ago
      It’s a bit more complicated than that! Among other things, it wouldn’t have fit in the machine (the first Newton device had 128k of RAM).
- NeutralForest 2y ago
  I don't know the story but why does a language ever fail? Lack of good tooling support, lack of buy-in from large projects, lack of use-cases, crowded market, etc. Not only does every new language (at the time) need to have similar ergonomics to the existing landscape, they also need compelling features to escape the inertia that keeps developers within one ecosystem.

mdaniel 2y ago

> The canonical "Hello World" program in Dylan. // File library.dylan: Module: dylan-user define library hello use dylan; use io, import: { format-out }; end; define module hello use dylan; use format-out; end; // File hello.dylan: Module: hello format-out("Hello!\n"); Give me a break, that is the most insane hello world I have very seen in my life, and I've seen brainfuck. The idea that one must also `use dylan;` in every file in a language named dylan is just stupid, going the extra mile to appear to the untrained eye to be an unused import since the next line is the import that actually matters

v9v 2y ago
I'm assuming that the "use dylan" is there for similar reasons as to why you declare that a package uses :cl in common lisp: This way if you want to define your own functions that replace those in the language (eg. a custom + function) then you can simply omit importing the dylan namespace and define those without worry of conflicts.

emorning3 2y ago

I remember Apple giving away Dylan CDs when Java was first released. I learned them both and went with Java. But I should have taken the opportunity to also learn the Common Lisp Object System. These days we like to bitch about OOP languages, but we could have had better.

brian-armstrong 2y ago

Was a bit dissapointed this wasn't a free model for generating Bob Dylan songs, honestly