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Re: Good book on Dylan?

In article <VDJx6.65$I5.3689@stones>, "Mark Jordan" 
<mark_jordan@nospam.ieee.org> wrote:

> "Bruce Hoult" <bruce@hoult.org> wrote in message
> bruce-CF4C25.09490601042001@news.nzl.ihugultra.co.nz">news:bruce-CF4C25.09490601042001@news.nzl.ihugultra.co.nz...
> >
> > It tends to be pretty quiet here in the newsgroup, but there's actually
> > quite a lot of activity going on in the Gwydion Dylan (the open source
> > implementation which compiles via C) developer mailing list.  I'd say
> > it averages around half a dozen messages per day, the majority of which
> > is people discussing improvements being made to the compiler.
> 
> Yeah, I was wondering about that. The only thing that concerned
> me was changes to the language between the two implementations

I don't think there have been many of those.  The DRM (Dylan Reference 
Manual) spec is pretty good and pretty complete and it's taken all our 
time just to catch up to that.  There are a couple of language 
extensions I'd like to see [1] but I can also see (in Gwydion at least) 
a lot of purely implementation improvements that would have just as big 
an effect.


 > > It's no wonder that it's so quiet around here, nobody even knows 
that
> > > Dylan exists! I'm beginning to wonder if there's some fatal flaw I 
> > > haven't
> > > spotted yet...
> >
> > Java arrived and got $$ behind it at *exactly* the point that Dylan was
> > nearly ready to take off, at least in the Mac community.  And then 
> > Apple
> > had money problems...
> 
> Is Apple using it now or have they dropped it?

Dropped, killed, buried deep.

It would be nice to think that they might be persuaded to put what they 
did into the public domain.  It was really very nice.


> What do you mean by "holding action"?

I mean that the guys there did a good job in getting the rights to 
Functional Developer from the people who bought Harlequin, but based 
purely on the amount of [in]activity I see there I don't think they've 
currently got much funding for future development.

What they *have* is already quite good enough that if it was Microsoft 
selling Functional Developer it would have tens of thousands (if not 
hundreds of thousands) of paying customers, which would provide quite 
adequate financing, but how they get there from here is an open question.

-- Bruce



[1] for example, being able to declare the signatures of formal 
arguments that are functions (e.g. the comparison function given to 
"sort"), and type-checking the function that is passed in, and having 
the compiler generate better code as a result
References: