Newton Poetry

Mike Levins on his favorite programming language:

I used to say it was 1992-era Dylan. Dylan was a Lisp that Apple invented. I worked for several years on Apple’s Newton project. Newton was initially written mostly in Dylan, and I got to write a lot of OS code in Dylan. That was a time of high joy in my programming life.

It didn’t last, of course. The story of Newton’s abandonment of Dylan and its other adventures makes entertaining reading, but the short of it is that eventually I had to stop programming in Dylan.

Turns out Dylan is still around, but Levins has moved on to a Lisp dialect called Clojure.

One of the little “to-do” items in life is some working knowledge of programming. I have no experience, besides basic HTML and CSS, and I’d love to be able to learn a real-life computing language.

While searching, I came across this Wikipedia entry on NewtonScript, the governing language of our good green friend.

Developed from a version of SELF, NewtonScript was designed by Walter Smith, who worked at Apple during the Newton’s heyday. He has a site dedicated to NewtonScript’s story.

Says Smith:

During the development effort that brought you the MessagePad, a new language–now called NewtonScript–evolved in parallel with the view system and object store. The language thrash made it possible: all those languages we looked at provided a wealth of ideas that found their way into NewtonScript. SELF was one of the primary influences.

Check out a great PDF of Smith’s findings here.

I didn’t know this, but according to Wikipedia, “the prototype-based object model of Self and NewtonScript was used in JavaScript, the most popular and visible language to use the concept so far.” I’ll be darned.