I have been following dylan for a while and I really appreciate its aesthetics.

I never really understood why Apple ceased development, other than a baby with the bath water mistake; it seems a far more appopriate and elegant language than objective-c for application development.

I'd appreciate all your comments and I would especially like to know how Paul G feels about Dylan as a blubbified lisp / scheme.

They didn't have the courage to make it a real Lisp, but they didn't dumb it down enough to appeal to mainstream programmers, so they ended up producing something that no one really loved, except possibly its parents.

Java is the only case I can think of where a company managed to force its programmers to start using a new language created for them. In 1995 you had to at least make the syntax look like C. That's probably less true now that so many programmers are used to Python and Ruby. But most ordinary programmers would probably still panic at the idea of writing code in s-expressions.