[NTLK] New NTK (was: Re: "Upgrading NIE")

> From: "L.W. Brown" <lwb@mac.com>
> Subject: Re: [NTLK] "Upgrading NIE"
> Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 21:33:59 -0400
>
> Well - should we convince Adriano to change the purpose of the fund,
> so that it speeds up Einstein?

No fund will speed up the Einstein project.

The main problem with your project to upgrade NIE is that there is
nearly no developer left. No one develops for the Newton. There's
maybe three developers who know enough of the internal of NewtonOS to
undertake this task and none can have the time to do it. Upgrading
NIE is too much work for new developers. This is why this funding
thing is completely unrealistic.

Even a much more simpler project doesn't find developers. We
definitely need a new NTK to develop Newton packages on MacOS X
without Classic. All the pieces are available: NEWT/0, a NewtonScript
interpreter and compiler, many open source libraries out there to
build packages (such as the DCL) and NewtObjC, an extension to NEWT/0
I wrote that allows one to power a Cocoa application with
NewtonScript. It could even be used to power a GNUStep application on
Linux.

Still, I begged talented NewtonScript developers Basuke, Makoto Nukui
(author of NEWT/0) and Adam Tow to build a new NTK, but none had the
time. If there's anything Newton users could do, it's this: finding a
way to get developers to develop a new NTK.

When Einstein will be able to run at a decent speed on PDAs, no one
will join the platform as there will be no reasonable tool to develop
new packages. So it's a dead end.

Paul

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