I’m curious - what is Dylan really for? Who should use it, and in what situations? I totally could have missed something obvious, but I read through the intro and the ‘Tour’, and it has a lot of detail about what the language is, but not much on when and where to use it. The closest thing seems to be it’s LISP but faster? What are the reasons to choose Dylan over C++, Swift, JavaScript, or Python?
Dylan is simply a historical curio, so there are no situations in which anyone should use it apart to study programming language history and to take inspiration from roads not taken. It's basically Common Lisp, with Algol-like syntax, less historical baggage (everything is a class, no weird stuff like prog and so and so forth) and more emphasis on efficient implementation. Unfortunately, it didn't catch on, but it's IMO a nicer language than python (which modelled inheritance rules on Dylan), Java, Javascript or C++.
Here are some interesting things about it:
1. It has an simple but nice trick for avoiding ugly_underscores: a-b is a single symbol, a - b is subtraction.
2. IIRC it was the first non-sexp language with a sophisticated macro system.
3. Like Common Lisp it has multi-methods and resumable exceptions (but unlikely Common Lisp all exceptions are resumable). If you want to play around with either multi methods and resumable exceptions, Common Lisp or Dylan are probably your best bets and Dylan has the advantage of being probably simpler to pick up.
I'll say this because it's possible to go from my username to name anyway: I share a name with this language. And usually that's fine because it's not very widely used. But seeing this headline was certainly a surprise on an otherwise calm Sunday morning.
I remember Apple giving away Dylan CDs when Java was first released.
I learned them both and went with Java.
But I should have taken the opportunity to also learn the Common Lisp Object System.
These days we like to bitch about OOP languages, but we could have had better.
I don't know the story but why does a language ever fail? Lack of good tooling support, lack of buy-in from large projects, lack of use-cases, crowded market, etc. Not only does every new language (at the time) need to have similar ergonomics to the existing landscape, they also need compelling features to escape the inertia that keeps developers within one ecosystem.
It wasn't ready in time for the product it was primarily intended to support, the Apple Newton, which was itself a flop in the market. If it had finished in time and the Newton hadn't been a flop, it could have been like Objective-C's move in the market with iOS (and earlier with NeXT and OS X but that was still pretty small compared to what iOS did to the language's popularity). A language buoyed by a popular platform. But that didn't happen.
// File library.dylan:
Module: dylan-user
define library hello
use dylan;
use io, import: { format-out };
end;
define module hello
use dylan;
use format-out;
end;
// File hello.dylan:
Module: hello
format-out("Hello!\n");
Give me a break, that is the most insane hello world I have very seen in my life, and I've seen brainfuck. The idea that one must also `use dylan;` in every file in a language named dylan is just stupid, going the extra mile to appear to the untrained eye to be an unused import since the next line is the import that actually matters
I'm assuming that the "use dylan" is there for similar reasons as to why you declare that a package uses :cl in common lisp: This way if you want to define your own functions that replace those in the language (eg. a custom + function) then you can simply omit importing the dylan namespace and define those without worry of conflicts.
Readit News
Here are some interesting things about it:
1. It has an simple but nice trick for avoiding ugly_underscores: a-b is a single symbol, a - b is subtraction.
2. IIRC it was the first non-sexp language with a sophisticated macro system.
3. Like Common Lisp it has multi-methods and resumable exceptions (but unlikely Common Lisp all exceptions are resumable). If you want to play around with either multi methods and resumable exceptions, Common Lisp or Dylan are probably your best bets and Dylan has the advantage of being probably simpler to pick up.
Which has had a good adoption story thus far.
https://info.juliahub.com/case-studies
Amusingly, Bob Dylan sued Apple for trademark infringement.
https://www.storiesofapple.net/dylan-sues-apple.html
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/today-apple-history-mac-7100-...
I never heard of Dylan Thomas's estate threatening legal action against Bob Dylan.
These days we like to bitch about OOP languages, but we could have had better.