[brent_noorda]

I just updated our "Nombas doesn't exist anymore" page, for readers of this nice and mostly-accurate article, with a little more background on why I think NASA chose it (tl;dr "robust and predictable"). <http://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm>

BTW, it just occurred to me after writing that that one of the first customers to ever license our software, over the dozen years we were in business, used it to control a camera, while possibly our last customer (NASA) also used it to control a (much bigger) camera. JavaScript: it's a language for taking pictures.

[xNeil]

This is awesome! How does it feel to have contributed to a massive advancement in space exploration? Did you develop ScriptEase with this use case in mind (cameras)? Why did ScriptEase development stop? Do you think ScriptEase would be useful in cameras today?

[brent_noorda]

Thank. Yes, it feels very satisfying having it finally be deployed and operational, like a big sigh of relieve after holding in a small bit of breath (one alveoli's worth) for 20 years. ScriptEase started when I began working alone on a project, instead of with big teams, and needed a faster program paradigm so that I alone could be as productive as a big team. It turned out to be generic enough that it was useful for a lot of types of projects, not just mine (which was to be an infinite backup product) or cameras (nothing on my mind at the time at all) but pretty much any software who's core libraries needed easy modification--also turned out to be useful in web browers, although I didn't know it at the time, because I didn't know there was such as thing yet as browsers or the web. The development stopped because by early 2000 times were really changing--people were getting less into paying for software libraries and more into getting free stuff; but it was 9/11 that really killed it, because our customers stopped paying us (because their customers stopped paying them, and so on). The final nail in the coffin was a big snowstorm on the day someone offered to acquihire us and move us to California where we'd never have to shovel snow again.

Finally, ScriptEase itself would have too many legal troubles being used by anyone, but I do believe just about everything needs a script language so it can be altered and customized and personalized and applied to infinite new purposes (and not a new one invented every week, just something boring and stable).

If I were to revive something from ScriptEase, I've often thought it should be the ideas behind the test environment around it. Where everything that can go wrong will go wrong and it must still survive.

[xNeil]

Thanks for the reply! Were you aware NASA was using ScriptEase? And was(is?) ScriptEase open source?

[brent_noorda]

NASA licensed one $3 copy, but we didn't know why until ~a year later (just a guess how long it was) then found they'd had a team analyzing lots of software options, so by 2003 or so we knew it was for a next-gen telescope.

SE was never "open source" in the standard sense, although almost everyone who licensed it got the source. In the very early nineties I was contact by people to say that what I'd been working on should be "open sourced" in the "free beer" context. I needed money to pay rent, put shoes on the kids' feet, and stuff like that, so didn't understand how to get paid for free software. They said "people will pay you to customize it, or to fix bugs" and I said "it's already ultra-customizable and I don't release software with bugs". I kind of get it now, and if I could talk to my old self I would tell self to open-source at least parts so that there was no reason for anyone NOT to use it. So now I'm working on inventing a time machine to go back and tell myself that and A LOT of more important things, but the time-machine work is going very very slow.

[SunboX]

Hey, thanks for the hint. I didn't know about Nombas at all.

Did you see the Espruino Engine? https://www.espruino.com/