What If Python Replaced Elisp?

[Lloyd Zusman]

Moshe Zadka <moshez at math.huji.ac.il> writes:

> On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, Grant Edwards wrote:
> 
> > One might argue that it would be hard to come up with a
> > portable, network-transparent windowing system that was much
> > simpler than X11
> 
> 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.
> 
> Sun employees will usually tell you it's DEC and other companies evil
> politics: don't buy this. Sun were stupid, the world lost a good window
> system.

I was working closely with the NeWS people at Sun back then.
Everything you're saying here is exactly what I saw going on, and in
addition, there was another reason for Sun's failure with NeWS: Sun
couldn't make up its mind about the product.  Part of the Sun
organization was pushing xview, and another part was pushing NeWS.
And at various times, one side had the ear of upper management, and at
other times, it was the other side.  This "schizophrenia" hurt NeWS's
chances quite a bit.

And it's too bad, because even today, some 8-10 years later, X still
isn't offering some of the functionality that NeWS offered back then.


> Moshe Zadka <mzadka at geocities.com>. 
> http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz at asfast.com