History of the Dylan programming language

Dylan programming language history first introduces the history with a continuous text. The second section gives a timeline overview of the history and present several milestones and watersheds. The third section presents quotations related to the history of the Dylan programming language.

Dylan was originally developed by Apple Cambridge, then a part of the Apple Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Its initial goal was to produce a new system programming application development programming 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 the language 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 novel Invisible Man, to reflect its status as a secret research project.

The initial killer application for Dylan was the Apple Newton PDA, but the initial implementation came too late for it. Also, the performance and size objectives were missed. So Dylan was retargeted toward a general computer programming audience. To compete in this market, it was decided to switch to infix notation.

Andrew Shalit (along with David A. Moon and Orca Starbuck) wrote the Dylan Reference Manual, which served as a basis for work at Harlequin and Carnegie Mellon University. When Apple Cambridge was closed, several members went to Harlequin, which produces a working compiler and development environment for Microsoft Windows. When Harlequin got bought and split, some of the developers founded Functional Objects. In 2003, the firm contributed its repository to the Dylan open source community. This repository was the foundation of the free and open-source software 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 Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Dylan implementation named for the Gwydion project, and founded the open-source model 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 thus shifted its research toward the mainstream and toward Java.

Today, Gwydion Dylan and Open Dylan are 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 to account for the Architecture Neutral Distribution Format (ANDF).

Dylan was created by the same group at Apple that was responsible for Macintosh Common Lisp. The first implementation had a Lisp-like syntax.

The acknowledgments from the First Dylan Manual (1992) states: