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by hindsightRegret 2618 days ago
The longest-lived vaporware in history
3 comments

I wouldn't necessarily label it as vaporware, but I would call it the most disappointing great idea in the history of computing.
A similar thing happened with Chiron: http://maf.directory/misc/chiron.html

Quote from Donald Knuth for context: "[Floyd] was destined to be disappointed that his dream of a new, near-ideal programming language called Chiron was never to be realized--possibly because he was reluctant to make the sorts of compromises that he saw me making with respect to TEX. Chiron was "an attempt to provide a programming environment in which, to the largest extent possible, one designs a program by designing the process which the program carries out." His plans for the Chiron compiler included novel methods of compile-time error recovery and type matching that have never been published."

The Copernican revolution had the same problem
Along with Augment