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Tree structured-editor with built-in language construct, sound like the incarnation of Cedar/Tioga desktop and programming environment by Xerox back in 1980s. This environment replaced three distinct programming environments that were very popular at the time at Xerox namely Smalltalk, Lisp and Mesa and according to Xerox's staffs it is a highly productive programming environment.

Perhaps someone should re-introduce the modern version of Cedar/Tioga similar to Apple and Microsoft re-introduction of the pervasive mouse/windowing user interface originally made by Xerox in 1970s.

1 comments

Ah, what a delightful rabbit hole your comment led me down.. I've got about twenty tabs open now, articles on the history of (and the relationships between) programming languages and graphical user interfaces. Will enjoy this food for thought!

My recent reading has included:

Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian Kernighan) - https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html

The Development of the C Language (Dennis Ritchie) - https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

JavaScript: The First 20 Years (Brendan Eich) - https://zenodo.org/record/3710954/files/jshopl-preprint-2020... (PDF)

This morning, this little phrase jumped out:

> C was created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment.

What this made me realize is that a language is a user interface. It makes sense how C evolved with UNIX as an operating system, that a language is deeply fundamental to a computing environment (and its development).

There's a parallel with JavaScript and Netscape. The language was meant to provide users with an interface to operate the web browser, create dynamic documents, and (as it turned out) to let users develop the web environment.

..Which brings me back to the Cedar/Tioga programming environment you mentioned. While searching around, I happened across another comment of yours (I see it's a favorite topic! :) and found the good stuff:

Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 (video)

Active Tioga documents: an exploration of two paradigms - http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/journals/epobetan/pdf/volum... (PDF)

The Mesa Programming Environment - http://www.digibarn.com/collections/papers/dick-sweet/xdepap... (PDF)

Fascinating. I saw a phrase, "active document applications", which interestingly is what the web has become, in its own monstrous way.

It's a good point about "re-introducing" old ideas. I was lucky to have grown up in the earlier days of computers, to have breathed (a little) of its different culture and worldview, that I've learned to appreciate its history and the wealth of ideas - what made possible our current networked computing environment, and visions yet to be fully realized.