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smurpy | 8 months ago

Haha! I used to do LOTS of work in PostScript. The biggest project was a system which was part Python for the management, but PS for the content of a database publishing engine, motivated by the the need to generate crazily complicated real estate books, back in the day. There was a whole huge template system for different kinds of commercial and residential property and all sorts of different sections, ranges and indices. It was responsible for generating hundreds of multi-hundred page documents per day for dozens of real estate boards across Western Canada. Each publication was about as complicated as a Yellow Pages and generated daily and automatically from ever-changing data. In fact, the underlying database schema could evolve automatically through the update mechanisms in RETS (the Real Estate Transaction System API), though that was on the Python side. The rendering happened using GhostScript out to PDF for printing and electronic distribution to realtors. A stupid amount of detail, but what else is a touch of the 'tsim for anyway?!?

My other PostScript stuff was mostly fun and experimental: some fractal hacks which made printers and typesetters groan and some collaborative knowledge visualization stuff. I got started with PostScript on my NextStation in 1991 and it served me well, being the basis of a whole career of programmatic visualization.

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smurpy|8 months ago

As a language it is lovely, if you're a fan of minimalism -- being stack-happy, like FORTH. It is well worth learning even just to flex the mind, but especially if you need to make complex diagrams and value stable APIs.

WillAdams|8 months ago

METAPOST seems to be similarly stable, and has an interesting programming/math model (DEK keeps it open in window and uses it (or METAFONT which it is based on?) for interactive math).