Everything you say is right. Some details look maybe a little different when viewed from the Newton team in Cupertino.
Yes, as the Dylan runtime got better, the Newton team wrote an OS in C++ with NewtonScript for scripting. There's more back story there, though.
Before any of that work started, an earlier iteration of the OS had already been written in the early Dylan, back when it was still called Ralph. There seemed to be some level of discontent in a few different quarters with that OS. Different people expressed different criticisms (that I heard). Different people assigned blame for their dissatisfactions differently.
It was all pretty good-natured, from what I remember.
But then John Scully told Larry Tesler: Let There Be an OS Written in C++. And there was. There is various gossip about exactly how that came to pass, but it did come to pass.
Larry asked me and a couple of other people to see what we could do with Dylan. We took that ball and ran with it--maybe too far. Like maybe Larry wanted us to run it down to the end zone and instead we ran it across the border and into Patagonia somewhere. We, the five of us or so, wrote a whole OS in Dylan, essentially competing with the 60 or so people working on Scully's mandated C++ OS.
I don't know why we did it exactly, except that we could, and it was really interesting. More to the point, I don't know why Apple management let us keep going with it so long. Morbid curiosity maybe? It did work pretty well, and I think there were some pretty interesting ideas in it.
From a business point of view, though, it was silly. Obviously Apple was never going to ship 2 Newton OSes. Equally obviously, it wasn't going to choose to develop our weirdo Lisp OS instead of Capps' C++ OS that was developed by almost the whole Newton team in response to an order from on high.
The period you describe, when Dylan was getting pretty good and the Capps OS had a lot of features and NewtonScript was pretty well working was well after the inflection point where the main group started working on the C++ OS. Our smaller team started on the second Dylan OS about the same time the other team started on their OS, and we made good (though pointless) headway. We used the same microkernel they did, and the same graphics infrastructure. Everything else in ours was written in Dylan. Dylan worked great.
In fact, that version of Dylan remains my favorite general-purpose programming language ever. I pretty much lost interest in Dylan when it stopped looking and working like a Lisp, but I've never liked anything else as much for day-to-day programming--not even Common Lisp, which is my go-to nowadays.
Creator of NewtonScript here… Hi Mikel! I'm glad to hear you say it was good-natured, because I loved Dylan—having been the Newton team's Cambridge liaison and Ralph cheerleader since the Cambridge team joined Apple. I was just head-down trying to build a small language that had at least some of the goodness of Dylan so we didn't ship something that was just a C++ app in a box!
I know you loved Dylan, and I know what you were up to with NewtonScript.
I did a little work in NewtonScript for the shipping Newton before I migrated to NeXT. It worked. Or it would have, if Newton had been a better fit for the market of the time.
The Cambridge team (or big chunks of it) later became Clozure Associates, Lisp consultants and maintainers of Clozure Common Lisp. I've worked for them off and on over the years on some interesting stuff.
Everything you say is right. Some details look maybe a little different when viewed from the Newton team in Cupertino.
Yes, as the Dylan runtime got better, the Newton team wrote an OS in C++ with NewtonScript for scripting. There's more back story there, though.
Before any of that work started, an earlier iteration of the OS had already been written in the early Dylan, back when it was still called Ralph. There seemed to be some level of discontent in a few different quarters with that OS. Different people expressed different criticisms (that I heard). Different people assigned blame for their dissatisfactions differently.
It was all pretty good-natured, from what I remember.
But then John Scully told Larry Tesler: Let There Be an OS Written in C++. And there was. There is various gossip about exactly how that came to pass, but it did come to pass.
Larry asked me and a couple of other people to see what we could do with Dylan. We took that ball and ran with it--maybe too far. Like maybe Larry wanted us to run it down to the end zone and instead we ran it across the border and into Patagonia somewhere. We, the five of us or so, wrote a whole OS in Dylan, essentially competing with the 60 or so people working on Scully's mandated C++ OS.
I don't know why we did it exactly, except that we could, and it was really interesting. More to the point, I don't know why Apple management let us keep going with it so long. Morbid curiosity maybe? It did work pretty well, and I think there were some pretty interesting ideas in it.
From a business point of view, though, it was silly. Obviously Apple was never going to ship 2 Newton OSes. Equally obviously, it wasn't going to choose to develop our weirdo Lisp OS instead of Capps' C++ OS that was developed by almost the whole Newton team in response to an order from on high.
The period you describe, when Dylan was getting pretty good and the Capps OS had a lot of features and NewtonScript was pretty well working was well after the inflection point where the main group started working on the C++ OS. Our smaller team started on the second Dylan OS about the same time the other team started on their OS, and we made good (though pointless) headway. We used the same microkernel they did, and the same graphics infrastructure. Everything else in ours was written in Dylan. Dylan worked great.
In fact, that version of Dylan remains my favorite general-purpose programming language ever. I pretty much lost interest in Dylan when it stopped looking and working like a Lisp, but I've never liked anything else as much for day-to-day programming--not even Common Lisp, which is my go-to nowadays.