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Talk:History of the Dylan programming language

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Chris Page (talk | contribs) at 02:22, 5 January 2007. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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