
Soup (Apple) – the Newton storage system - dsr_
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_%28Apple%29
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paulrpotts
I worked on several vertical and in-house apps for the Newton platform back in
the day. I was at the launch in Boston and the first couple of development
conferences. Landon Dyer's work and Walter Smith's work on the object store
and the NewtonScript language implementation was amazing. It had some
performance and practical issues and bugs, but developing for the thing was
largely a joy -- the closest I've come to the live coding and debugging on a
dynamic runtime that people loved about the original Lisp machines. I've
always felt that we would have been better off with a NewtonScript 3.0 than
either Java or JavaScript. JavaScript in particular -- it was like the basic
ideas of NewtonScript implemented badly by people with no taste and a "kitchen
sink" approach to language design.

Along with Apple Dylan, the platforms were really ahead of their time. Going
back to Objective-C felt like such a huge step backwards. And now I'm
developing primarily in C and C++ and still wishing for something better. I
satisfy my not-so-secret longings by writing Haskell in my spare time...

