Apple Dylan

Apple Dylan was a first run of Apple Computer, Inc. at an integrated development environment for the Dylan language. It appeared as a technology release in 1995 for the MC68k platform. It had numerous flaws, mainly that it was built on the top of the MCL (Macintosh Common Lisp from Digitool) development environment. Although this made it a wonderful environment, it was a severe restriction on further progress. Because Apple got into serious financial trouble that time, they had to stop Dylan development and dissolved the Apple Cambridge team. In a final act Digitool was funded to do a port to the PowerPC platform. The result of this (with some patches) still runs on MacOS 9.2 (but not in the “Classic” compatibility box under Mac OS X).

Apple Dylan TR does not implement all of Dylan; macro support especially is rudimentary. Otherwise it is an awesome IDE, probably the best around, despite the fact that it is 8 years old.

Paul R Potts was an Apple Dylan beta tester, and has written several pages detailing his experiences and impressions: