Dylan People

People involved in Apple's Dylan Project

The Dylan Cambridge Group

The members of the Apple Dylan team are listed in the Colophon of the Dylan Reference Manual. Here are some notes to a few people:

Ike Nassi

Ike Nassi started the Apple Computer's Cambridge Research Laboratory in 1989, which was part of Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Nassi has made one of his goals the establishment of OODLs (object oriented dynamic languages) as a mainstream programming paradigm. He led the team that produced both Common Lisp for the Macintosh, and the Dylan programming language. His counterpart in Apple's Advanced Products Group (APG) was Larry Tessler. Rick Fleischmann was Dylan Product Manager at Apple Computer, Inc.

On Tuesday, 3 Oct 1995, the Directory of Cambridge Engineering, wrote his "Thanks and farewell from Cambridge".

Mike Lookwod

Mike Lookwood has given an anektode about closing the Apple Cambridge Labs, which is part of the History of the Dylan programming language.

David Moon

David Moon worked on MacLisp, Flavors, CommonLisp, and Dylan. He was a former Symbolics staffer as was Dan Weinreb, Neal Feinberg, Kent Pitman, Scott McKay, Sonya Keene who were all invovled in the Dylan project.

Andrew Shalit

Andrew Shalit worked hard on the Dylan Reference Manual; even after Apple closed the Cambridge Research Laboratory in January 1996.

Back in 1992, on Tue Sep 15th, he wrote to dylan newsgroup: "I'm very happy to announce the formation of three new mailing lists for discussions specific to the Dylan programming language."

Oliver Steele 

 I was at Apple Cambridge during the design of the Dylan programming language.  
 While I was there, several of my coworkers (David Moon and Kim Barrett, at 
 least) were involved with the final stages of the Common Lisp language 
 standard. These were two different points along a spectrum of process 
 formality.
Oliver Steele mentions this in his Blog entry Designing a Language, May 13, 2003. Oliver Steele also provides a museum entry related to Apple Dylan.

Steve Strassman

Steve Strassmann, Intellectrician, at Apple Computer Inc., (aka The Dylan Answer Guy) who serves with great patience as mentor to early explorers of Apple Dylan. Well known is his article First Look at Dylan: Classes, Functions, Modules published in MacTech (The journal of Macintosh technology), Develop Issue 21 (1995). It is one of the best intoductory articles.

Gail Zacharias

After the close of the Apple Cambribge Labs she worked at Harlequin and later was a cofounder of the Harlequin spin off, Functional Objects. Now she returned to the Lisp community.

People involved in Harlequin's Dylan Project

The members of the Harlequin Dylan team are listed in the Colophon of the Dylan Reference Manual. Here are some notes to a few people:

Jonathan Bachrach

He played an important role in the design of the dynamic object-oriented language Dylan. In January 1993 he wrote to comp.lang.dylan 

 I am trying to start a Dylan programming revolution at my work. To
 me, Dylan is a dream come true. To other people, Dylan looks good but 
 everybody wants to know WILL DYLAN TAKE OFF? Dylan's future is quite 
 uncertain given that there are no viable implementations and that Apple 
 hasn't even announced a Dylan product. Thus I find myself without 
 the sort of ammo needed to put the skeptics' at ease.
 PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE help me convince the management. I feel that Dylan 
 will far surpass Common Lisp in popularity, but my educated guess may 
 not be enough. Any words of wisdom, insights, or information (e.g., 
 will apple release a product and/or are there commercial products
 forthcoming) would greatly be appreciated!
Scott E. Fahlman replied 
 The best strategy is probably to wait until Dylan is real (and 
 maybe help it to become real) [...]
Jonathan Bachrach choose to help to become real and was able to convince the management. Later he was the manager of Harlequin's Dylan team and one of its key compiler and runtime developers.

The key members of the Harlequin Dylan Development Team were: Jonathan Bachrach, Scott McKay, Gary M. Palter, Keith Playford and Jason Trenouth.

Jonathan Richard Bachrach was also involved in the design of the object-oriented language Sather while a postdoctoral researcher at U.C. Berkeley.

Paul Haahr

Paul Haahr wrote an acedemical paper related to Dylan A Monotonic Superclass Linearization for Dylan together with Kim Barrett, Bob Cassels, David A. Moon, Keith Playford, and P. Tucker Withington. In his past Dylan time he also started an Dylan tutoruial Procedural Dylan which is unfinished. In the www you find About Paul Haahr and Paul Haahr Blog (mostly none technical entries).

Scott McKay 

 One reason I find C++ and Perl 
 surprising (to use) is that the mental model seems
 incoherent to me.  What is also surprising is that
 their bizarre mental models came from one person!
Scott McKay in a message to the Lightweight Languages Workshop 2001.

Ian Piumarta

Ian Piumarta was also involved with collaborative research in the context of the ESPRIT "OMI/GLUE" project (see Open Dylan Archive: The Harlequin Research Papers). Somebody interested in Computer Science might look on his interesting list of publications.

Ian Piumarta is currently (2008) a research personnel for the STEPS project. ( see STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming, First Year Progress Report (Dec 2007) )

Paul Tucker Withington 

 At Harlequin I was the senior member of the Adaptive Memory Management Group.  
 We chartered ourselves to centralize the memory management expertise in the  
 company, to create a framework and substrate that could supply the memory 
 management needs for all the company's products, and to investigate 
 commercializing this substrate as a product. The framework supported 
 Harlequin's ScriptWorks Postscript interpreter and Harlequin Dylan development 
 environment. I participated in Dylan language design, contributed to the 
 method precedence and threads extension designs, and proposed extensions in 
 support of memory management, weak references, and finalization.
Quoted from Paul T. Withington's Resume.

The Adaptive Memory Management Group was responsible for the Memory Pool System (MPS).

P. Tucker Withington worked on CommonLisp,Curl, Dylan, and Laszlo.

In the Dylan community he is well known as co-author of the Dylan Programming book. The Open Dylan community put up an online version of Dylan Programming.

The website of Paul Tucker Withington lists several further publications and also provides a Blog.

People involved in CMU's Gwydion Project

The academic partner of Apple's Cambridge Lab was the CMU.

People involved in Dylan's Open Source Implemenation projects

In the mids of the nineties tubulence in the profitablity of Apple Computer ecame the knockout for all Apple spondered Dylan Projects. So in the wake of the turbulence Apple closed the Apple Cambridge Labs and CMU no longer had a founder for their engaged Gwydion Project.

The History of Dylan Programming Language on the Wikipedia mentions that Apple shut down the January 1996 and Scott Fahlmann stated in Sep. 1998 that CMU is no longer involved in Dylan. At that point only Harlequin was still involved in Dylan activities.

There was already a broad interest in the language and successfully a open source community was founded to take over CMU's Gwydion Code. The community members of the first days were Andreas Bogk and Eric Kidd. Later on many important contribution came by (alphabetical order): Doug Auclair, Tom Emerson, Brent Fulgham, Gabor Greif, Matthias Hölzl, Bruce Hoult, Peter Housel, Hannes Mehnert. These volunter became the Gwydion Dylan Maintainers.

In 2003 the original Harlequin Dylan implementation was open sourced. Several former Harlequin member were already active in the community, e.g. Carl Gay, Chris Page. Other Harlequin and Apple Cambridge Labs shared their knowledge to comp.lang.dylan. E.g. the Harlequin members Hugh Greene, ...

The Dylan community today maintains two implementations: Gwydion Dylan and Open Dylan. Nowadays the community refers to itself no longer as Gwydion Dylan Maintainers. After a discussion they choose as name Open Dylan Community. The Open Dylan Community has its web presence under the domain http://www.opendylan.org .

Possible Connections / Possible Supporter

Possible connections to Microsoft

Bill Chiles, former at Harlequin

Bill Chiles is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft who has worked on dynamic language projects (CMU Common Lisp, Dylan) and tools for most of his career. Bill spent nine years on the Visual Studio Core Technologies team and now works on IronPython and the Dynamic Language Runtime. He published the MSDN article CLR Inside Out --- IronPython and the Dynamic Language Runtime (Oct. 2007). At Harlequin he coded parts of the environment source of what's now Open Dylan.

To Do

What about