First, some personal background: When I was an intern at Harlequin, I was one of the first users of Harlequin Dylan. Later, when CMU stopped work on Gwydion Dylan, I helped start an open source project to maintain it. And when Harlequin wanted to start open sourcing their Dylan (which later became https://opendylan.org/ ), I met with them to help hammer out licensing details. Harlequin released a lot of cool code.
What was cool about Dylan? Well, it was a basically a relative of Common Lisp, but with an infix syntax, but it had been simplified to improve code performance. It was a more ambitious language than Java, with full closures, basic macros, and generic functions. Dylan had static typing if you wanted it, or you could leave code untyped. (Unfortunately, collection and function types were fairly weak due to the lack of standardized generic types.)
In the end, Apple's abandonment of Dylan and the rise of Java united to make Dylan irrelevant. But it was a fun language, and I had a lot of fun hacking in it. I think that the closest popular language at the moment, design-wise, is probably Julia.
I still remember one 20-hour day that where a friend and I set up tower computers in a cozy basement room at Dartmouth, and I eventually convinced the Gwydian FFI tool to parse 10,000 lines of Linux headers.
First, some personal background: When I was an intern at Harlequin, I was one of the first users of Harlequin Dylan. Later, when CMU stopped work on Gwydion Dylan, I helped start an open source project to maintain it. And when Harlequin wanted to start open sourcing their Dylan (which later became https://opendylan.org/ ), I met with them to help hammer out licensing details. Harlequin released a lot of cool code.
What was cool about Dylan? Well, it was a basically a relative of Common Lisp, but with an infix syntax, but it had been simplified to improve code performance. It was a more ambitious language than Java, with full closures, basic macros, and generic functions. Dylan had static typing if you wanted it, or you could leave code untyped. (Unfortunately, collection and function types were fairly weak due to the lack of standardized generic types.)
In the end, Apple's abandonment of Dylan and the rise of Java united to make Dylan irrelevant. But it was a fun language, and I had a lot of fun hacking in it. I think that the closest popular language at the moment, design-wise, is probably Julia.
I still remember one 20-hour day that where a friend and I set up tower computers in a cozy basement room at Dartmouth, and I eventually convinced the Gwydian FFI tool to parse 10,000 lines of Linux headers.