This is fascinating, write more like this, but it’s all exposition? where is the analysis? you were saying to see what they got right and what was laughably naive?

It is fascinating that they based PM as hard to program. Remember the apocraphyl tale of its creation (OS/2)? Gordon Letwin locked himself in his office and posted a sign saying something like ‘don’t feed the animal.’ Clearly not the approach that would be taken in the Age of Agile. One of the things I am most obsessed with these days is how rarely presentation layer frameworks make coding easy. Yet most hard core programmers spend zero time talking about it. They’ve ceded that territory to page jockeys. They would rather sit around and bludgeon each other with sugared loop optimizations, or purported inefficiences.

The Postscript section here should be expanded into a whole post. I wrote a lexer/parser for doing wiki markup a few years before Markdown dropped and found that it was remarkable how often such tools fail in ways that indicate obvious implementation shortcomings (Textile and some of its variants were maddeningly nutty).

Anyway, hope this feedback is useful. Definitely interesting.