Talk:Dylan (programming language)

Context of Dylan
Just curious about the history of Dylan, why it never took off - why did Apple stay with Objective C? ffangs (talk) 20:36, 6 April 2008 (UTC)ffangs

"uninformed" programmers
The article says: "Dylan also uses multiple inheritance, but the developers spent enough time on the classloader to avoid the problems that continue to make many uninformed programmers believe that multiple inheritance is a "bad idea"."

Do you need to say "uninformed"? That doesn't seem very neutral at all. The MI article here, even, doesn't say it's necessarily "good" or "bad".
 * Okay, I've removed that. — Chris Page 09:40, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Article Updates
Harlequin's Dylan IDE now open source at http://www.opendylan.org (Excuse my several minor edits which I did not flag.) pet-ro 22:25, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Article ignores groundbreaking development environment
I wrote the manual Using the Apple Dylan Development Environment, but I don't claim to be a Dylan whiz.

I am confident that the innovations in Dylan as a language are well covered here, but this article seriously scants the Dylan development environment, which was as sweet as you could possibly imagine. I sure hope there is someone reading this who could do it justice. The environment was built around the language and vice versa, and anyone who knows Apple Dylan knows the environment is equal in importance to the language proper.

The fundamental concept is the project which uses all the powers of the environment -- inspectors, browsers, editors, all that -- to create a full application. Thhe project can, at any time, be unplugged from the development environment and plugged into an application nub somewhere on a network. This means, to quote the manual:


 * "A project under development can be loaded into the Application Nub and run under the control of the develpment environment. The Application Nub also permits you to debug a standalone application (One that has already been built and runs outside of Apple Dylan)."

I may be a naive technical writer, but I have alway thought that the unfettered ability to take a piece of software so smoothly from development to deployment and back and even to be able to patch virtually on the fly was frickin' revolutionary. The Nub and the environment were interchangeable, so you weren't hauling the development environment around with you, as on the Lisp machine, but any time you needed the enviroment, there it was in full force.


 * I don't know if you saw the Dylan Finder demo at WWDC 95 (or thereabouts) but it was jawdropping. And of course just a demo that went nowhere in the days of Copland. But still. Joseph N Hall (talk) 23:55, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not the one to do this work alone, I'm not a developer, I'm a writer and that's what I did on the project, and came in late, at that, but it really is a great story and I'd love to work with someone else who knows more about it from the technical side. Who knows, maybe some of my pals from Cambridge Apple Engineering will see this and be inspired.Ortolan88 06:34, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * These properties of the Apple Dylan environment may indeed be notable, but from the sound of it, it isn't as revolutionary as it sounds. Smalltalk has been like that for a long time now, for instance. I doubt you can get a more unified development/deployment environment than Smalltalk! :) - furrykef (Talk at me) 04:03, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Although the general user experience of a dynamic development environment is not unique to Dylan, the Apple Dylan IDE delivers these capabilities in a new way, by separating the development environment from the target program. Smalltalk and Lisp are (or were at the time Dylan was created) monolithic environments where the target program existed inside the development environment, at least during the development phase. In addition, it could be considered novel that the Smalltalk/Lisp-style dynamic development experience was delivered for a language that can be used to produce programs more akin to C++ in their dynamism (since Dylan spans dynamic and static programming and allows programmers to choose how much dynamism they wish to use in a given program). - Chris Page 20:46, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Does anyone have any screenshots of Apple Dylan


 * Two screenshots: http://www.opendylan.org/browser.phtml --Georgeryp (talk) 17:38, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

What does "Many classes have methods that call their own functions" mean?
In "Methods and generic functions" the article says: "Many classes have methods that call their own functions, thereby looking and feeling like most other OO languages."

What does this mean? (Note that I have in the past read the Dylan Reference Manual and I still can't understand it.) 192.117.103.141 6 July 2005 08:46 (UTC)

Pronunciation
Is it pronounced /ˈdɪlən/, like the name, or /ˈdaɪˌlæn/, like dynamic language? —Keenan Pepper 02:50, 8 January 2006 (UTC)


 * It is pronounced like the name. — Chris Page 09:08, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Dylan is welsh, and is actually pronounced "dull ann" (as in Dylan Thomas). It is often mispronounced as dill-un in the US. The correct pronounciation for the programming language should therefeore be the same as the name Snaptech 09:51, 20 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Dylan is a portmanteau of "DYnamic LANguage" and has nothing to do with Welsh. Everyone I've ever met who worked on the various Dylan implementations pronounced it the way the name "Dylan" is pronounced in the USA, roughly "dill un". (I wish I knew the phonetic spelling but alas I don't.) Carlgay (talk) 06:41, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Does anybody still use it?
And was anything significant ever developed using it? Uucp 18:59, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
 * It's been used to win a few programming contests but I don't know about significance... pfahlstrom 01:15, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * The most significant thing written in Dylan is Open Dylan itself.
 * I still use it. Carlgay (talk) 06:56, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Dylan helloworld editor.jpg
Image:Dylan helloworld editor.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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BetacommandBot (talk) 21:49, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Dylan helloworld project.jpg
Image:Dylan helloworld project.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot (talk) 21:50, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

bang ('!') allowed in identifiers or not?
There seems to be a discrepancy over whether bang ('!') is allowed in identifiers or not...

Quoting the main article...


 * Identifiers in Dylan may contain more "special" characters than most languages. Besides alphanumeric characters and hyphen-minus signs, Dylan allows the following non-alphanumerical characters as part of identifiers: underscore (_), asterisk (*), ampersand (&), less-than sign (<), equals sign (=), greater-than sign (>), vertical bar (|), caret (^), dollar sign ($), percent sign (%), and at sign (@).

(...)


 * define function factorial (n :: ) => (n! :: ) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.38.182.133 (talk) 22:00, 24 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Per the chapter "Lexical Syntax" of The Dylan Reference Manual, exclamation marks are allowed in names. So I guess somebody should add this to the article. – Tea2min (talk) 05:07, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I have removed the (incomplete) list of graphic characters allowed in Dylan identifiers. (Otherwise the article probably would have to fully replicate the Lexical Syntax chapter of the language specification.) – Tea2min (talk) 05:23, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

The "Modules vs. namespace" section needs much love
To be blunt, the section never really says anything concrete about how the Dylan module system actually works, and it has a lot of irrelevant notes about other OO languages. I think it should mention


 * Multiple modules per library
 * Interface modules vs implementation modules
 * Maybe: Export/import names (vs Lisp systems exporting symbols)

Any reference to String, and most other text should be removed. (I'll try to find time to do that, but not now.) Carlgay (talk) 06:54, 26 December 2022 (UTC)