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Well befor the NEXT stuff took over Apple had things like Dylan in the pipeline. Dylan blows Objective-C out of the water, and it blows Swift out of the water.

by nickik 12y ago

Well befor the NEXT stuff took over Apple had things like Dylan in the pipeline. Dylan blows Objective-C out of the water, and it blows Swift out of the water. The tools devloped in Apple research where very advanced and very good, but the all got shutdown because of apples money problems. Then the change happend and we went to new system, most of the old research was never continued. Honsly while I was programming Objective-C I would often have visions of how the world could have been diffrent if Dylan, instead of Objective-C had become THE Apple language. I completly agree with you, most of the time, technical quality does not mean success.

pmontra 12y ago
Out of curiosity I googled for Dylan and this is what it looks like http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/ I think it's := a little bit => too heavy: with :: <punctuation>; but I like the use-of-hypens in symbols instead_of_underscores as in Lisp and as a common practice in CSS. So many shift keys saved! That should be the standard and who cares if we wouldn't be able to write a-b. a - b is more readable anyway. Check a large piece of code for a general feeling of the language https://github.com/dylan-lang/http/blob/master/common/http-common.dylan https://github.com/dylan-lang/http/blob/master/common/http-c... It's from 1992 so it's got a chance to influence Ruby (1995). If you look at both you'll clearly see many similarities in the general style of the language, despite Ruby making a lighter use of punctuation and that can have a large effect. Open that Dylan code side by side with this Ruby https://github.com/puma/puma/blob/master/lib/puma/server.rb https://github.com/puma/puma/blob/master/lib/puma/server.rb which has more or less the same role in a web server implementation. The main Dylan repositories have a fair amount of activity so it's a fringe language but not dead https://github.com/dylan-lang https://github.com/dylan-lang
- pjmlp 12y ago
  You missed a very important thing. The language can also be used for systems programming and the standard toolchain has native code compilers. Not something you can currently say about Ruby implementations.
- lispm 12y ago
  Dylan is something like CLOS + Scheme + Infix-Syntax. It was developed as a competitor to something like C++, now Java, Objective C, now Swift, ... for application development. It was not thought as a competitor to PERL, Python, Ruby, Basic, Javascript, TCL, ... or similar languages.
- nickik 12y ago
  Dylan is not dead, but it did die at Apple. After Apple droped it diffrent companys tired to keep it alive. Now there is a small groupe of maintainers keeping the compiler and librarys alive that was writen in these companys. Dylan is in many ways more advanced then Ruby. Optional types, macros, multi method dispatch, conditional restarts, optimized for fast compilation, gneric opject creation with 'make'. From a feature standpoint, dylan can easly take on any other language that is outthere. My point really was that I dont think NEXTSTEP that was from then on used, was in all ways a improvment as many people seam to think.

by nickik 12y ago

pmontra 12y ago

Out of curiosity I googled for Dylan and this is what it looks like http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/ I think it's := a little bit => too heavy: with :: <punctuation>; but I like the use-of-hypens in symbols instead_of_underscores as in Lisp and as a common practice in CSS. So many shift keys saved! That should be the standard and who cares if we wouldn't be able to write a-b. a - b is more readable anyway. Check a large piece of code for a general feeling of the language https://github.com/dylan-lang/http/blob/master/common/http-common.dylan https://github.com/dylan-lang/http/blob/master/common/http-c... It's from 1992 so it's got a chance to influence Ruby (1995). If you look at both you'll clearly see many similarities in the general style of the language, despite Ruby making a lighter use of punctuation and that can have a large effect. Open that Dylan code side by side with this Ruby https://github.com/puma/puma/blob/master/lib/puma/server.rb https://github.com/puma/puma/blob/master/lib/puma/server.rb which has more or less the same role in a web server implementation. The main Dylan repositories have a fair amount of activity so it's a fringe language but not dead https://github.com/dylan-lang https://github.com/dylan-lang

pjmlp 12y ago
You missed a very important thing. The language can also be used for systems programming and the standard toolchain has native code compilers. Not something you can currently say about Ruby implementations.
lispm 12y ago
Dylan is something like CLOS + Scheme + Infix-Syntax. It was developed as a competitor to something like C++, now Java, Objective C, now Swift, ... for application development. It was not thought as a competitor to PERL, Python, Ruby, Basic, Javascript, TCL, ... or similar languages.
nickik 12y ago
Dylan is not dead, but it did die at Apple. After Apple droped it diffrent companys tired to keep it alive. Now there is a small groupe of maintainers keeping the compiler and librarys alive that was writen in these companys. Dylan is in many ways more advanced then Ruby. Optional types, macros, multi method dispatch, conditional restarts, optimized for fast compilation, gneric opject creation with 'make'. From a feature standpoint, dylan can easly take on any other language that is outthere. My point really was that I dont think NEXTSTEP that was from then on used, was in all ways a improvment as many people seam to think.