Introduction To The History
Dylan was originally developed by Apple Cambridge, then a part of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. Its initial goal was to produce a new systems programming application development language for the Apple Newton PDA, but soon it became clear that this would take too much time. Walter Smith developed NewtonScript for scripting and application development, and systems programming was done in C. Development continued on Dylan for the Macintosh. The group produced an early Technology Release of its Apple Dylan product, but the group was dismantled due to internal restructuring before they could finish any real usable products. According to Apple Confidential by Owen W. Linzmayer, the original code name for the Dylan project was Ralph, for Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man (reflecting its status as a secret research project).
The initial killer application for Dylan was the Apple Newton PDA, but the initial implementation came just too late for it. Also, the performance and footprint objectives were missed. So Dylan was retargeted towards the general programming audience. To compete in this space it was decided to switch to Infix notation.
Andrew Shalit (along with David Moon and Orca Starbuck) wrote the Dylan Reference Manual, which served as a basis for work at Harlequin (software company) and Carnegie Mellon University. When Apple Cambridge was closed, several members went to Harlequin, which produces a working compiler and development environment for Windows. When Harlequin got bought and split, some of the developers founded Functional Objects. In 2003 Functional Objects contributed its repository to the Dylan open source community. This repository was the foundation stone of the open source Dylan implementation Open Dylan.
In 2003 the dylan community had already proven its engagement for Dylan. In summer 1998 the community took over the code from the CMU Dylan implementation known as Gwydion project and founded the open source project Gwydion Dylan. At that time CMU had already stopped working at their Dylan implementation because Apple in its financial crisis could no longer sponsor the project. CMU therefore shifted its research toward the main stream and shifted towards Java.
Today, Gwydion Dylan and Open Dylan represent the only working Dylan compilers. While the first is still a Dylan-to-C compiler, Open Dylan produces native code for Intel processors. Open Dylan was designed with the Architecture Neutral Distribution Format (ANDF) in mind.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Dylan Programming Language
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