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Symbian to Open Source OPL

Posted by timothy on from the mind-the-fine-print dept.

simpl3x writes "Symbian is apparently going to open source their Basic-like development language used on the Psion platform. Here is a link via the Register. Interesting things seem to be happening in the mobile space, and although Psion had some very nice technology, they never seemed to get anywhere in the U.S. Any comments on developing for Psion, or Symbian for that matter? I am interested in the development environments people prefer."

2 of 9 comments (clear)

  1. delightful machines by Spudley · · Score: 2, Informative

    Psion: The Amiga of handhelds.

    That sums it up really; elegant design, way ahead of it's time, but poorly marketed (still sold pretty well in some quarters, tho), and now getting well and truly stomped on by the big M$ in the form of PocketPC (now that they've finally begun to catch up).

    Very sad that another innovative product seems to be losing the fight. Psion discontinued their truly excellent Series 5 just as sales of PDAs were begining to accelerate. :-(

    There is hope, though - Symbian is the reborn son so Psion, now selling the OS to any handheld manufacturer that's interested. I only hope the new company can maintain the vision and innovation of the original... and has better fortunes.

    --
    (Spudley Strikes Again!)
  2. OPL by ralphclark · · Score: 2, Informative

    Is this the language that started out as OPL on the on the original Psion Organiser handhelds? I had a Psion II, a brick-like thing with a 6Mhz CPU and a 2-line x 16-character mono alphanumeric display. I loved it to bits. When I left college it was the only computer I had but OPL was sophisticated enough for me to sharpen my coding skills on.

    Programming this thing gave me my first experience of staying up all night "in the zone" then being shocked to hear birdsong and looking up to see the pre-dawn sky lightening through the window,

    I remember writing a debugger, disassembler and reverse interpreter so I could debug programs for which the source had been wiped (you soon ran out of storage even with the 64K eprom memory pack, which you couldn't easily erase). I remember writing a blues melody generator (on the pathetic litle piezo speaker) to help me with guitar practice. And a little proglet that emitted an ultraonic whine to make the dog next door shut up whenever he started his interminable barking.

    The first thing it taught me was the difference between theory and practice. The lecturers at college were heavily into data abstraction and functional programming (this was pre-OO) and that was great - but just try programming something recursive when you've only got 8K to play with and you soon learn the value of unrolling it into an iterative version before punching it in.

    Hard to believe now but because of the limited hardware, for anything bigger than a few lines, I used to code up all my programs on a good old fashioned spiral bound notepad (easy to rip out a page if you need to rewrite a subroutine) and only key them in when I was sure I was near to getting a good compile. It was actually much quicker that way, and being forced to think things out like that rather than depending on trial & error made me a better programmer.

    Good Old Psion Organizer II. Now lying unloved at the bottom of a dusty old drawer. Wouldn't do to be seen with it now!