For those interested, Dylan was a language with semantics close to Scheme, with object system inspired heavily by Lisp CLOS (with multiple inheritance and multiple dispatch), with infix, non-sexp-based syntax (kind of Lua-like), but also with pattern-based hygienic macros.
Honestly, just reading that list of features should be enough to get anyone interested, it died because the company behind it went out of business IIRC, which is a shame. It still exists, is on life support over at https://opendylan.org/index.html - without a dedicated IDE and up-to-date windowing library it's a bit unwieldy, and it lacks something like 20 years of performance optimizations that went into other compilers, but it still works. And, even now, its linguistic features are way ahead of Java; it would be easier to compare it with Scala rather than Java - and it was like that in '95.
Well, it feels more like an exhibit in a museum now rather than a real, workable tool - but at least it's preserved in this form, so there's still hope that someone will step in and revitalize it...
Also the Dylan team at Apple even though they already knew about their death sentence, went ahead and finalized their NewtonOS implementation ahead of the team redoing it in C++.
There was a comment from one of their team members a couple of years ago here in HN.
I think Julia and Swift both have a bit of Dylan on their souls. :)
EDIT: Found the Dylan post with comments from the Newton team. Search for entries from wrs and
mikelevins.
Honestly, just reading that list of features should be enough to get anyone interested, it died because the company behind it went out of business IIRC, which is a shame. It still exists, is on life support over at https://opendylan.org/index.html - without a dedicated IDE and up-to-date windowing library it's a bit unwieldy, and it lacks something like 20 years of performance optimizations that went into other compilers, but it still works. And, even now, its linguistic features are way ahead of Java; it would be easier to compare it with Scala rather than Java - and it was like that in '95.
Well, it feels more like an exhibit in a museum now rather than a real, workable tool - but at least it's preserved in this form, so there's still hope that someone will step in and revitalize it...