Languages and ideas

I was delighted to see that the Prograph idea is making (attempting?)
a comeback as Marten.

After all, my entire resume of publications relates to Prograph
(unless one counts a couple of technical reviews).

And the only Classic application I still use is one I wrote in
Prograph. Written during the 680x0 days, it advanced to PowerPC by
adding the conversion library that the Prograph folks (by whatever
name they had at the time) provided. (The application was initially
done in Smalltalk, and had a brief MacForth phase and an even briefer
MacApp phase (where I had Apple event access done but not the UI).
Every version has been able to export and import data in a nice tab-
delimited text format. I'm currently playing with the beginnings of
a version using our WebKeystone system with MySQL data storage,
although the Prograph version is still the live one. I'll likely do
one for the modern Mac, and switch to that.

<http://www.webkeystone.com> (only available on OlympusNet sites at
the moment).

On Dec 14, 2005, at 1:31 PM, Edward Reid wrote:

> At 05:06 PM 12/12/2005 -0800, TidBITS Editors wrote:
>> The Prograph language itself is an idea, and ideas are free.
>
> Well... a programming language is the expression of an idea, and as
> such is subject to copyright. Assuming Prograph is being used
> legitimately
> by Marten, then the originators released the rights. Of course, it's
> possible that the developers of Marten don't officially have the
> rights but
> have good reason to believe that no one will object to their using the
> language.
>
> This is why the court decided in favor of Sun in the Java case,
> saying that
> Microsoft had to stop modifying Java without Sun's permission.

Given how often the Prograph developers managed to escape the
Canadian one-strike-and-you're-out* corporate bankruptcy system, I
wouldn't be surprised to learn that use of the Prograph copyright(s)
became easily available. But seemingly not the trademark.

*Not quite one strike: buyouts can be arranged under terms pleasing
to the court

   --John

Actually there was a big campaign to take Prograph open source when it was clear that Pictorius wasn't going to do anything. Pictorius finally opened up the source code and Marten is a result.

I used Prograph to great effect in the 90's - on one project I was budgeted to produce a prototype but by using Prograph I was able to produce the real thing and still have budgeted time to do the documentation. I fully expect Marten to achieve the same for OSX and if you need to be developing of OSX I'd strongly advise lashing out on the $65 for Marten and steering well clear of AppleScript Studio and the like...

Roland Whitehead