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In "Don't Feed the Geeks", 10/26/95, I wrote: "Hey -- there seems to be a rule in the Macintosh world. Don't feed the geeks! Look at PC Week. Lots of geeky stuff. Look at MacWeek. Hmmmm. Seems there was a price to pay for the Macintosh launch motto -- The Computer For the Rest Of Us. Sure, that worked in 1984. But nowadays geeks rule the world."
Well -- they decided to feed the geeks after all!
Please check out their
Frontier Review and the
Clay Basket Review.
A quote: "Using test scripts to compare AppleScript and UserTalk, Frontier's language, on a Power Mac 8100/80, Frontier's execution zoomed past AppleScript's by 11 times, while calls to library subroutines were more than 40 times faster."
Another quote: "Every Mac scriptor should take a look at the new Frontier. Compared with AppleScript, it provides a richer, better- documented language, better integration with other applications, greater Power Mac performance and a built-in database. With all these features, Frontier has earned a permanent place in our desktop arsenal."
I'd add: Frontier and Clay Basket are unique to the Macintosh. There is no scripting environment on Windows or even Unix that matches the power of Frontier. This power makes publishing systems, groupware applications, web servers and web content development apps that run on Mac networks much more powerful than anything running on other platforms.
It's been four years and it feels just great to finally get the truth out from a credible source.
Cooool.
Thanks MacWEEK!
Dave Winer
PS: I have a full DaveNet essay in the works on the Mac as an easy-to-learn platform, why it isn't easy-to-learn, and why it doesn't matter.
PPS: My immediate goal is for the Macintosh to be the most powerful Netscape platform, by a wide margin, using the Netscape plugin architecture and connections to Java.
PPPS: Got a few days to kill? Lots of people don't know that all past issues of "DaveNet" are on the web.