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Re: What happened to Apple Dylan
On 6/24/01 4:54 AM, Gabor Greif, (gabor@mac.com), wrote:
> Till the end of '95 the core
> team got a chance to wrap up all they had and package it as a product which
> came out as the Apple Dylan Technology Release. It featured PPC code
> generation but did not itself run on PowerPC natively. The development bed
> was all Common Lisp and there was no PPC MCL (Macintosh Common Lisp) at that
> time. Later Digitool was paid to port the environment to PPC using their
> development version of MCL for PPC they were working on. Apple Dylan TR PPC
> was quietly released 1996. It still runs fine on classic MacOS, dunno about
> X.
Yes, I'm aware of all this, but none of it is really relevant to why Apple
execs killed the Dylan project. They did that because nobody could show them
a release quality product when they started swinging the meat axes.
> Java did not materialize as the mainstream language Sun has hoped, and the
> world still needs a good alternative to C++ (which is a major pain).
> This is a second chance for Dylan and several people work on it.
We know that now, but for most of the late 90s, Java was almost universally
acknowleged to be the programmers godsend. Any Apple Dylan going up against
that juggernaut would have had little or no chance.
However, I agree very strongly that a window of opportunity for Dylan (and
Common Lisp as well) is opening now, especially on MacOS X, where the major
platform shift (from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X) has opened significant
market niches because many of the big players have been quite slow off the
mark due to their "wait and see" atitude toward X.
--
Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
raffael@mediaone.net
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