Rainer Joswig
Hamburg, Germany
Email: joswig@lisp.de

Harlequin's, oops, Functional Objects' 'Functional Developer' implementation of Dylan is Open Source.

What happened to Harlequin's former development products? MLWorks disappeared, LispWorks survived at Xanalys and DylanWorks finally is open sourced as Functional Developer. Dylan originated in Apple's (now closed) R&D labs as an attempt to bring development and deployment advantages of Lisp and Smalltalk to 'mainstream' developers. For that purpose Apple hired some of the brightest minds from the Lisp community to create a new programming language. Some of them later went to Harlequin (which was developing their own implementation of Dylan already) after Apple stopped working on Dylan. Harlequin eventually was sold (it was not profitable) and in that process the DylanWorks product was given to a new company, Functional Objects. Unfortunately Dylan never attracted many mainstream developers (especiallly after Java appeared) and fortunately it was never really competetive as a Dynamic Language with Lisp. Still there are many good ideas in Dylan and its implementations (some of them from Scheme, Common Lisp, Smalltalk and other Dynamic Languages). Some enthusiasts still keep the language alive. Somewhat.

Links:

Functional Developer 2.1 for Win32 Snapshot Release

Gwydion Dylan

Functional Objects, Inc.

Keywords:

DYLAN