Talk:History of the Dylan programming language

I believe that much of the content of this article is either irrelevant, too specific, or condensable into smaller chunks. A lot of it consists of what looks to be personal correspondence, quotes, first-hand recollections of events, name dropping, forum posts copied verbatim, and so on. Further, I suggest that, since higher profile languages, such as C and Java do not have seperate history pages, the relevant information in this article be relocated to the main article. If for some reason it is determined that this page should be retained, I suggest that it be renamed to something along the lines of History of the Dylan programming language to better conform to the standard. Thoughts?

--IRelayer 06:59, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

I once started the page. I think the history of Dylan is a unique one as so many experts at Apple, CMU and Harlequin work on launching the language.

Your suggestion to rename it to History of the Dylan programming language is accepted. This also means that the page will not merge to "Apple Dylan" or "Dylan (programming language)". Therefore I will move relevant the tags proposing a merge, before I will rename (move) the page.

87.166.239.135 10:33, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree with several of IRelayer's comments, although I think having a separate, detailed history page is desirable. It was originally a short section in the main Dylan page, and it would add too much noise to leave it there. As for those other languages, I'd love to see separate history pages for them, as well, rather than remove this one.

As a specific example, I take issue with the accuracy of some of the comments attributed to Raffael Cavallaro:
 * “Apple started to become less profitable because of the Wintel juggernaut.” The “Wintel juggernaut” had already dominated the market for many years at that point. The problem was more likely how Apple was being managed at the time.
 * “Apple was making the transition to PowerPC, and Apple Dylan still only ran on 68k machines, and only compiled to 68k binaries. So, it was looking like it would be at least another year, maybe two before there was a usable PowerPC product, so the project was cancelled.” I can't see how the transition to PowerPC was a significant factor, especially since a PowerPC implementation of Apple Dylan was produced. Apple Dylan certainly wasn't ready to ship, but it wasn't the CPU support that was the problem.

Although the reality of such a situation is always more complex than can be captured in a few sentences, and I have no knowledge of how close Raffael was to the situation, I think it's more accurate to say that Apple was cutting several projects to save on operating expenses, and Apple Dylan wasn't even shipping yet. The Newton was also canceled, and it had been shipping for a few years at that point. They also cut all of the Advanced Technology Group.

I'm inclined to cut down on the amount of quoting—especially where the quotes don't meet Wikipedia's standards for neutrality—and instead reference those that are available elsewhere online, but in general I find this page useful in that it preserves history and source material.

Chris Page 02:22, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Rewrite needed
The timeline needs to be converted to readable prose. The liberal use of quotations should be trimmed as some of them are so long that they may be violating copyright. Budding Journalist 07:15, 9 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Go for it! &mdash;Ashley Y 07:37, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

First try
Already done

Second try
pet-ro (talk) 10:25, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

The initial killer application for Dylan was the Apple Newton PDA. Its inital goal was to produce a new systems programming application development language for the Apple Newton PDA.

According to Apple Confidential by Owen W. Linzmayer, the original code name for the Dylan project was Ralph, for Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man (reflecting its status as a secret research project). Dylan in its early "Ralph" state was a Scheme+CLOS variant, which was use in the "Bauhaus" project. The "Bauhaus" project goal was to write Newton OS in Ralph. This project was done by Apple's Advanced Product Group. Soon it became clear that this would take too much time. Also performance and footprint objectives were missed, because the memory of restrinction at that time. So Walter Smith developed NewtonScript for scripting and application development, and systems programming was then done in C. The development of the new programming language continued for the Macintosh.

As Ralph was a Scheme+CLOS variant, the first Dylan Reference Manual in 1992 used a prefix notation ( a Lisp-like s-expression notation. The fist Dylan Reference Manual was work out by the Apple Cambridge Labs, then a part of Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). (The ATG East was another name the Apple Cambridge Labs.) Dylan was targeted towards the general programming audience. Due to discusssions to better target the main stream programming audience it was decided to switch to an infix notation. First Design Notes were published, then an Interim Dylan Reference Manual.

The Apple Cambridge Labs not only designed the language, but also Apple Dylan, which was a Interactive Development Environment (I.D.E.) for the language. At that time, the early nineties, very visionary. Oliver Steele's Museum provides an impression. And in parallel several team members, at least David Moon and Kim Barrrett, worked on the Common Lisp language standard.

Apple has a financial cris and the group was dismantled due to internal restructuring before they could finish any real usable products. The members of the Apple Cambridge Labs (which are listed in the colophon of the currentDylan Reference Manual.

Andrew Shalit (along with David Moon and Orca Starbuck) wrote the Dylan Reference Manual, which served as a basis for work at Harlequin (software company) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). When Apple Cambridge was closed, several members went to Harlequin, which produces a working compiler and development environment for Windows. When Harlequin got bought and split, some of the developers founded Functional Objects. In 2003 Functional Objects contributed its repository to the Dylan open source community. This repository was the foundation stone of the open source Dylan implementation Open Dylan.

In 2003 the dylan community had already proven its engagement for Dylan. In summer 1998 the community took over the code from the CMU Dylan implementation known as Gwydion project and founded the open source project Gwydion Dylan. At that time CMU had alread stopped working at their Dylan implementation because Apple in its financial crisis could no longer sponsor the project. CMU therefore shifted its research toward the main stream and shifted towards Java.

Today, Gwydion Dylan and Open Dylan represent the only working Dylan compilers. While the first is still a Dylan-to-C compiler, Open Dylan produces native code for Intel processors. Open Dylan was architectured with the Architecture Neutral Distribution Format (ANDF) in mind.