What If Python Replaced Elisp?

[PM Lashley]

Kragen Sitaker wrote:
> 
> In article <Pine.GSO.4.10.10003102317130.4723-100000 at sundial>,
> Moshe Zadka  <mzadka at geocities.com> wrote:
> >Yes, but that argument wouldn't hold water: NeWS was such a system. The
> >only reason that it didn't kick X11's butt was that Sun was making the
> >same mistakes it makes today with Java while the good boys at MIT were
> >throwing out reference implementations to the public domain.

Nah, the mistakes with NeWS were -much- more severe than the ones
they may be making with Java.  At least with Java, you can easily
get the source.

The availability of the X11 reference sources were part of the reason
why it won the server war; but the biggest reason was that at that time
Sun was still small and growing fast.  The other workstation vendors
were taking an across-the-board stance that anything Sun supported,
they would reject.  (Unless there really wasn't any choice, or they
had already committed to it.)

> I thought I heard X11 was more efficient than NeWS.  I've used NeWS
> only once (on a Sparc ELC) and it seemed snappy enough; did I hear
> wrong?

Absolutely wrong.  NeWS 1.0 was smaller and faster than X11.  It was
the X11/NeWS merge that killed NeWS performance.  (And also killed
bit-for-bit PostScript pixilation compatability.)

But even after the merge, NeWS was still a clear winner in 'thin-wire'
(low bandwidth between server and client) applications.

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