It was event driven but not object oriented. By that I mean, code was executed based on responses from a control like a push button or when text was entered in a text area. You would have click responses to a button that would execute code written for that button. That’s why it was considered event driven. It wasn’t object oriented because it didn’t have classes. We used it for a marketing system at Sears for many years and I was wondering if the language still existed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16631346 (March 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362115 (April 2015)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030798 (Jan 2014)
The 2018 comment links to https://www.eslsyndetic.com/Documentation/overview_of_respon....
From there I got to https://web.archive.org/web/20030220213927/http://www.eslsyn..., which makes it clear that Easel was renamed ESL and https://www.eslsyndetic.com is indeed its current incarnation. I guess that means it still exists.
Then into the early 2000s at FirstUSA/BankOne/Chase, where it powered their card services CRM system. This application had a metric ton of business logic, and tied together DB2, 3270 scraping via custom C executable, ImagePlus for viewing customer letters and correspondence history (also brokered via custom C executable), and a few other systems. We eventually replaced with with a C++/MFC application on Windows backed by CORBA services in a massive port effort. For a very long time the new application was a much worse experience than the original.
Easel was commonly used in OS/2 financial shops (both of the above fit that category) with heavy mainframe integration. I would have to assume there are /some/ legacy users still kicking around, but the last I knew of were a few Boston-area companies phasing it out also in the early 2000s. Around that time, consultancy rates for the language started to go way up as domain expertise was pretty rare.
Easel's 'block' style (I don't remember exactly what it was called) for accepting input from external systems was the first time I ran into anything like the pattern matching I next saw in Erlang. I enjoyed working with Easel - it presented a reasonable abstraction for GUI creation and interaction, was easy to integrate, and the event model made a lot of sense.
It was also obtuse and sometimes painful to use, but no more so than any other language (then or now).
I started doing a little digging when I saw this article, and came across this in Jeff Sutherland's "The Scrum Handbook" [1]
Scrum has risen from being a method used by a number of
enthusiasts at the Easel Corporation in 1993, to one of
the world’s most popular and well-known frameworks for
development of software. The continued expansion of the
global rollout of Scrum is testimony to the fact that Scrum
delivers on its promise.
The first Scrum team was created at Easel
Corporation in 1993 by Dr. Jeff Sutherland (the
author of this manual) and the Scrum framework was
formalized in 1995 by Ken Schwaber.
Me: young, new to the professional world, making my way around a new environment at Sears in 1994. You: an shy but engaging language, event driven, with a style that was new and exciting for that time and place. It's been a long time but I still think about you whenever I write addEventListener. Would love to reconnect, even if only to share some memories of that time.