Talk:Dylan (programming language)
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".
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'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)