Meme (Multitasking Extensible Messaging Environment): Multiuser Forth VR (1994)
Interesting criticism from David Cake and Gavin Bell. Fortunately now we benefit from nice IDEs and other tools for editing popular programming languages (but none I know of for FORTH or PostScript, but there are lots of applications that edit or write out JavaScript and JSON and WebAssembly, even built into every browser ;).<p>Before JavaScript was released on December 4, 1995, there actually was some disagreement about not just about which language to use, but whether a browser should include a Turing-complete programming language at all. Sun was pushing TCL as a contender, then RMS issued his fatwa against it, and Sun switched over to pushing Java (not because of RMS though ;).<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;1997.webhistory.org&#x2F;www.lists&#x2F;www-vrml.1994&#x2F;0268.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;1997.webhistory.org&#x2F;www.lists&#x2F;www-vrml.1994&#x2F;0268.html</a><p><pre><code>    From: &quot;Gavin Bell&quot; &lt; (fwd)&quot;gavin@krypton.engr.sgi.com&gt;
    Date: Fri, 24 Jun 1994 09:41:24 -0700
    To:  (fwd)&quot;www-vrml@wired.com
    Subject: Re: Meme

    &gt;Marc de Groot wrote:
    &gt;&gt;Meme has certain features that I would want to see in any specification for
    &gt;&gt;VRML. In particular, Meme allows the world designer to specify platform-
    &gt;&gt;independent executable code for the object&#x27;s behavior. Without this
    &gt;&gt;ability, objects have relatively rigid, uninteresting behavior.

    David Cake replied:
    &gt; Basically VRML browsers need to be basically include much of the function
    &gt; of a simple interpretive language, and hopefully both a basically object
    &gt; oriented one (personal preference, I guess), and one that is not too
    &gt; verbose (for efficient use of low bandwidth). In this it would function
    &gt; like most existing cross platform packages of various kinds (many database
    &gt; packages, for example).

    [Gavin Bell replied:]

    One of the things I really like about HTML is that it is reasonably
    easy to write an editor that allows you to read in and then modify any
    HTML file.

    One of the things I really hate about PostScript is that is is really
    hard to write an editor that can edit an arbitrary PostScript file.
    Meme strikes me as more PostScript-like than HTML-like; it looks like
    it would be easy to write applications that wrote out Meme files, but
    it looks very difficult to write applications that provide a
    user-friendly interface for editing Meme files.</code></pre>