Re: Dylan Programming Guide, website updated

On Jan 21, 2013, at 8:53 AM, Bruce Mitchener wrote:

> Around the net:
> 
> * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5091549
> * https://lobste.rs/s/s3ixfb/dylan_programming_guide_1996_now_available_in_pdf_epub_updated_html
> * http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/16zcoa/dylan_programming_guide_1996_now_in_pdf_epub/
> * http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/16zcwj/dylan_programming_guide_1996_now_in_pdf_epub/
> 
> The last one actually has a couple of comments.

A minor correction: I did eventually move to the C++ Newton, albeit briefly.

The sequence of events (if I can remember them all correctly) was:

- John Sculley takes a trip to Japan with marketing dude Michael Tchao

- Sculley returns from Japan having been persuaded by Tchao that everybody hates Dylan because it sucks, and orders Larry Tesler to switch development to C++.

- A glum Larry announces the change. Cheering is heard from the general vicinity of Steve Capps.

- Larry approaches Matthew Maclaurin, Jim Grandy, and me, and says he neds a "crack team" of Lisp hackers to see what can be done with Dylan before it's too late for it to have any role in Newton.

- Matthew and I pull a Stallman, working 100 hours a week for 18 months to reproduce in Dylan the efforts of 60 programmers working in C++. We manage to pull off somehting like 60% of it, plus, with the help of Yuying Chow and eventually Ken Dickey, we add a few nice features not in the C++ version.

- Larry, suffering exhaustion and burnout from two years of uphill battles, bails out of Newton (just as Steve Sakoman--Newton's creator--did before him). Without our main executive defender, bauhaus' days are numbered.

- Newton management holds an official review of bauhaus. The verdict: we met and exceeded every goal we were given, but Apple's paying 60 people to write a C++ version that Sculley commanded, and is paying the four of us to write a Dylan version that no longer had any champion in upper management. Apple was only going to ship one of them; guess which one?

- I get assigned to write the German version of the Newton UI, which I dutifully do for about four months before leaving to work at NeXT for a while.

It was the following year that I returned to Apple to work on SK8, just after Ruben bailed out under pretty much the same kind of circumstances in which Larry and Sakoman did.

Shortly after that, Sculley got 86ed by the board and replaced by Michael Spindler, who somehow managed to accelerate Apple's downward spiral even more.  Soon after that, the board gave Spindler the boot and hired "turnaround artist" Gil Amelio to try to save the company's bacon, which he did, although not in the way he planned: he ended up negotiating to purchase NeXT and bring Steve Jobs in to serve on Apple's board. Steve Wozniak summarized what happened next as, "Gil Amelio meets Steve Jobs: game over."
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