Spiritual Lineage

Etienne Vautherin - 2025/02/07

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In 1984, I experienced an unforgettable love at first sight: I encountered the QuickDraw APIs in Pascal! Today it seems completely trivial. However, one must imagine that at the time, software developers for personal computers expressed themselves in assembly or BASIC. Now, there in front of me was a mathematical definition of a point on the screen, a line connecting two points, a rectangle, a “region.” It was fabulous! Previously, I saw Apple as a company that could only sell its closed products through misleading marketing. Upon reading “The Mathematical Foundation of QuickDraw”, I’ve definitely decided to “Think Different”!

However, the level of abstraction of procedural Pascal quickly proved inadequate for efficiently managing concepts born in Smalltalk. That is why MacApp immediately became essential for me, and I followed all of its evolutions until its decline.

And then, behind QuickDraw is an extraordinary man named Bill Atkinson. Bill brought UCSD Pascal to the Apple II in two weeks. It’s not his most well-known work because Bill then created QuickDraw, MacPaint, and HyperCard embedding the HyperTalk language. And it is here that the full breadth of this man’s visionary spirit is revealed: HyperTalk already approached natural language! So, to automate System 7, Apple logically drew inspiration from HyperTalk to create the AppleScript language, which still works on Sequoia 15.3!

In June 2024, for the 40th anniversary of my encounter with QuickDraw, Apple announced Apple Intelligence, which promises to drive the third party apps in natural language, thanks to the advances in generative AI. All the abstraction work done around AppleScript came back to me. An Apple Event Suite clearly defined and exposed the structure of the app content and the available app actions. This seams so similar to AppEntity and AppIntent! In the following weeks, I dissected every clue from the videos presenting this technology.

There are indeed true similarities. However, Apple Intelligence presents a major enhancement over AppleScript in conveying semantics. In an AppleScript Suite, the meaning resides in a class. With Apple Intelligence, the meaning exists in each instance through the semantic index maintained by the “User Context”.

Although, I found the proof of this spiritual lineage: look at the ending wrap-up of the WWDC 2024 video “Bring your app’s core features to users with App Intents” by Christopher Nebel!

I would like to elaborate further with small anecdotes: there are still so many ideas running through my head, chasing after Bill Atkinson, but also Larry Tesler. However, I must also move forward with actual creation with iOS 18.4, which shouldn’t be much longer now!