Oh man. I used PostScript a ton when I worked at hp 20 years ago. It's actually a pretty great language, like lisp/scheme but I found it to be more approachable somehow. Maybe because it's postfix instead of prefix?
Anyway, it had several fatal flaws. I don't think it could handle images natively, so instead it encoded them as vectors and those files took up MB. It probably just needed a metaphor like iframe.
I remember when Apple switched to the PDF engine in Quartz in preparation for OS X in the late 90s, I thought it was a mistake then. The QuickDraw it was replacing was actually quite good, in some ways the epitome of C-style rendering. And Cocoa was refreshing at first (it handled stuff like palettes and gamma in a data-driven way instead of through leaky abstractions) but without a way to transition off QuickDraw, it felt like more busywork that had to be done just to keep up.
Apple seems to have lost its academic roots, and suffers for it now. Or I should say, its customers suffer while it grosses almost half a trillion dollars per year. At least with vibe coding we can just whip up a Preview app in an afternoon, so maybe none of this matters anymore.
alt Hacker News
Oh man. I used PostScript a ton when I worked at hp 20 years ago. It's actually a pretty great language, like lisp/scheme but I found it to be more approachable somehow. Maybe because it's postfix instead of prefix?
https://liucs.net/cs101s13/fixity.html
Anyway, it had several fatal flaws. I don't think it could handle images natively, so instead it encoded them as vectors and those files took up MB. It probably just needed a metaphor like iframe.
I remember when Apple switched to the PDF engine in Quartz in preparation for OS X in the late 90s, I thought it was a mistake then. The QuickDraw it was replacing was actually quite good, in some ways the epitome of C-style rendering. And Cocoa was refreshing at first (it handled stuff like palettes and gamma in a data-driven way instead of through leaky abstractions) but without a way to transition off QuickDraw, it felt like more busywork that had to be done just to keep up.
https://eclecticlight.co/2024/06/01/pdf-on-macs-the-rise-and...
Apple seems to have lost its academic roots, and suffers for it now. Or I should say, its customers suffer while it grosses almost half a trillion dollars per year. At least with vibe coding we can just whip up a Preview app in an afternoon, so maybe none of this matters anymore.