30 Years of Frontier
My goal was to create an environment I would work in for the rest of my career. I just realized it’s exactly 30 years later, and I’m still using it.
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Now that I also work in JavaScript, it amazes me how easy the simple things are in Frontier, compared to JS, esp when you have to tack on a database. You really have to work at seeing what’s going on. In Frontier, you just click around expanding things. You can even look at the runtime stack that way.
If you never used Frontier, it’s hard to explain what made it so special. My very favorite thing about Frontier is the “object database”. It wasn’t like using a database in the SQL sense. It was just persistent storage.
Douglas Adams asked me to add support for running Frontier scripts in DragThing about twenty years ago, and I did, because he was Douglas Adams.
Automatic props to @mattneub, whose Frontier, The Definitive Guide is published online here for those that’d like to learn more[…]
It’s an excellent book.
For the past few days I’ve been working on adding Frontier-like object database (ODB) support to my database framework.
Previously: Congratulations.
