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Re: Why I don't use Dylan
In article <d3ta5.81377$HK2.1403092@news20.bellglobal.com>, "Maury
Markowitz" <maury_markowitz@hotmail.com> wrote:
> For some reason that I don't understand, computer programming
> is based on a popularity contest. The faintest whiff of suspicion
> on the future of any development system is enough to send it into
> the trash by the vast majority of the user it's targetted at.
> Sometimes this is deserved, consider ProGraph's almost-comical
> series of "we're back!" followed by "sorry, dead again".
Hard to avoid, I think. It takes a large investment of time to learn a
new programming language, and once you build up your own library of
useful stuff you really don't want to find that the company that
produced your programming language is dead and that a new OS version is
incompatable with what you're using, or that show-stopping bug will
*never* be fixed.
It's amazing how long THINK Pascal kept on keeping on years and years
after it was no longer developed, sold or supported, but something in
about MacOS 8.1 or so finally killed it and it's dead, dead, dead today,
even thought it's *still* probably the best ever Pascal or C learning
environment.
Which is why I'm so excited about Gwydion Dylan. Right now it's less
cosmetically polished than either the Apple Dylan or Functional
Developer products, but it's also very bug-free and produces good code
and produces better code with every month that goes by. And because I
have the source code and it's a simple command-line application I can
make it work on any system that I want to use in the future, and can fix
any bugs myself.
> However, consider Dylan at Apple. Seems to me that the vast
> majority of Mac users are still better off on Dylan than they
> are on, say, C++ for the "average" project,
I certainly think they would be.
> and yet it's usage is effectively zero. There's a number
> of good reasons for this, but an equal number of bad ones that are likely
> more often the case.
Where would we be now if Apple has included the source code on the Dylan
Technology Release CD?
-- Bruce
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