Bill Kearney

Reinventing the Newton?

Green might be interesting. Lua might be very interesting.

As someone that was a Newton developer and hacked deep into it's very core, there's a LOT more to the Newton than the window manager. The nature of how the underlying mutlitasking OS operated in close conjunction with the virtual machine was nothing short of extrordinary. What the users saw wasn't even a scratch on the surface. HWR pun intended.

Don't get me wrong but cobbling up a UI isn't making a Newton. Nor is just having an bytecode machine. The object store was wickedly cool.

Now, I don't use Lua so I can't comment on it's abilities. If it embraces the concepts that the Newton used of inheritance (prototype and parent) then it's certainly something interesting. But as someone at Apple commented, unlike Self, the Newton ran in 8mb and well. And unlike Magic Cap, it's garbage collector worked. These may sound trivial but when you're in a resource deprived situation like a handheld you really need them.

Couple the seamless way the Newtonscript program language could reach out and manipulate the resources with an object store that transparently handles paging with a UI AND does it in resource conservative fashion and you've got something. But without that seamless mix you might as well go back to slogging away in perl/python and tk.