Tuesday, October 21, 2003
The Dylan Programming Language
Here's a little programming language history that I dug up. Years ago, I had been tracking the progress of the Dylan programming language. Back then Apple was promoting it as "the next big thing". It is a cool language but it never really found enough of a following.
Dylan began with Apple's acquisition of Coral Software in Cambridge, MA. Coral developed Macintosh Common Lisp. Apple asked them to continue to support MCL and simultaneously develop a new dynamic language with the power and convenience of Lisp and Smalltalk but with the performance required for production applications. Dylan started out with Lisp prefix syntax but eventually supported a more conventional infix syntax. The tools and environment were hosted in MCL but standalone Macintosh executables could be generated.
The Apple Newton was originally going to be programmed in Dylan but a series of delays and memory constraints eventually led to it being abandoned. The Newton software team looked at Self which led to the development of the prototype-based language NewtonScript.
The original code name for Dylan was Ralph (after Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man). When the Newton team decided to develop NewtonScript, Ralph was refocused for use on the Macintosh. Apple decided to name the product Dylan, which stood for Dynamic language. Apple distributed a Beta release at WWDC in May 1994. A few months later, Bob Dylan sued Apple for trademark infringement. According to the lawsuit, "Apple is intentionally using, and intentionally has used, the names of famous individuals, including (Isaac) Newton, Carl Sagan and now Dylan, in conjunction with Apple's products in a deliberate attempt to capitalize on the goodwill associated with these famous individuals". Apple settled out-of-court and obtained the rights to trademark Dylan. Apple Dylan shipped in Fall 1995 but the project was abandoned shortly afterwards.
Mike Lockwood relates the last days of the Apple Dylan project. Sad but pretty funny. Oliver Steele was the project lead for the Dylan development environment and has some screen shots of what the IDE looked like.
Despite Apple's abandonment of Dylan, there's still a user community out there and a few implementations of the language. The Apple Dylan release is still available but doesn't run on OS X. There's also Gwydion Dylan, the Marlais interpreter and Functional Developer, The first two are open source projects, the last is a commercial product.
Dylan began with Apple's acquisition of Coral Software in Cambridge, MA. Coral developed Macintosh Common Lisp. Apple asked them to continue to support MCL and simultaneously develop a new dynamic language with the power and convenience of Lisp and Smalltalk but with the performance required for production applications. Dylan started out with Lisp prefix syntax but eventually supported a more conventional infix syntax. The tools and environment were hosted in MCL but standalone Macintosh executables could be generated.
The Apple Newton was originally going to be programmed in Dylan but a series of delays and memory constraints eventually led to it being abandoned. The Newton software team looked at Self which led to the development of the prototype-based language NewtonScript.
The original code name for Dylan was Ralph (after Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man). When the Newton team decided to develop NewtonScript, Ralph was refocused for use on the Macintosh. Apple decided to name the product Dylan, which stood for Dynamic language. Apple distributed a Beta release at WWDC in May 1994. A few months later, Bob Dylan sued Apple for trademark infringement. According to the lawsuit, "Apple is intentionally using, and intentionally has used, the names of famous individuals, including (Isaac) Newton, Carl Sagan and now Dylan, in conjunction with Apple's products in a deliberate attempt to capitalize on the goodwill associated with these famous individuals". Apple settled out-of-court and obtained the rights to trademark Dylan. Apple Dylan shipped in Fall 1995 but the project was abandoned shortly afterwards.
Mike Lockwood relates the last days of the Apple Dylan project. Sad but pretty funny. Oliver Steele was the project lead for the Dylan development environment and has some screen shots of what the IDE looked like.
Despite Apple's abandonment of Dylan, there's still a user community out there and a few implementations of the language. The Apple Dylan release is still available but doesn't run on OS X. There's also Gwydion Dylan, the Marlais interpreter and Functional Developer, The first two are open source projects, the last is a commercial product.
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