Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!poit.Eng.Sun.COM!hopkins
From: hopkins@poit.Eng.Sun.COM (Don Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: the NeWS ReNaiSSaNCe
Message-ID: <9006270852.AA01736@poit.sun.com>
Date: 27 Jun 90 09:09:23 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 32

I've just started working full time at Sun in the NeWS toolkit group!
(In case you thought I was going to accept an internship at PARC this
the summer, you can read my posting to alt.drugs.) Since the recent
rash of "NeWS is dead" messages, I and several other people have been
convinced enough to bet our careers that Sun has completely changed
its attitude towards NeWS, and is now totally committed to investing
the resources to develop NeWS into its full potential, and doing what
has to be done to make it succeed.

It's always been darkest before the dawn (puns intentionally avoided).
I was pretty depressed a while there myself, but a lot has changed!

There have been some *significant* changes to tNt (the NeWS toolkit,
aka NDE) and the underlying substratum to make it much smaller and
faster, and a lot of work is going into improving the PostScript
interpreter. But what's even more important is that there is a real
commitment to developing tools and applications for the NeWS toolkit.

Since I've started here, I've read the new tNt documentation, and I
am very impressed! I've attended a couple of design review sessions,
and I am very impressed by the thought and attention everyone puts
into speed, size, consistent naming, and learnability for both
application writers and subclassers! Then I read the code, and I am
very very impressed at how well factored it is, that you can get so
much out of so little code! And after all that, I was not surprised
but certainly very impressed at how fast it runs!

It's not ready yet, but it's *definitily* going to happen, and it'll
be *great* when it does! And it will keep getting better, because
it's designed to take advantage of the future!

	-Don