Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-server windowing systems (2013)
Although I admire and frequently agree with this blog, I think this article exhibits some common misconceptions about NeWS. NeWS had what amounted to uploadable toolkits, and therefore could and did have multiple toolkits. A client could decide how it wanted to separate processing between the client and server, which seems truly more flexible and allows for much more efficient communication. Also NeWS had threads which if done today would certainly use multiple processors. Clients could, but didn&#x27;t have to, use a separate address space and language even. But the graphics API was so much better, it&#x27;s ridiculous, and is basically the same as now in SVG, html canvas, and most other decent things.<p>The big drawbacks of NeWS in my opinion are not having an MIT license, and being quite difficult to implement well. Also PostScript isn&#x27;t the nicest language to program in, which I say from years of programming in it. But it&#x27;s far from the worst, and if one changed the to postfix syntax to prefix, it would be mostly a Lisp.