It's worth listening to, or at least reading the transcript, just for the Dave Winer burn. (And so much more!)
>Adam: That was it. That was the creation of JSON, which everyone is using today. But back then, everyone rejected it.
>In some ways it was a marketing problem. On one side, you had Doug, trying to convince customers that they can build interactive applications on the web using JavaScript and this simple thing called JSON. But on the other side, you had XML that had these big companies behind it, IBM, Microsoft, and big consultants. And later they even had some tech influencers like Dave Winer.
>Douglas: He’s someone who should have known better. He had a website called scripting.com. His style of scripting came from a clever program that he had written for the Macintosh called Frontier, in which he had a scripting language and an outliner and a word processor and a database, all in one program. And the idea was that you could do virtually anything in Frontier with a little bit of scripting. And he was also one of the big promoters of SOAP, the Simple Object Annoying Protocol.
>I don’t remember what the A was, but it might have been atrocious or abominable, I don’t know.
>But SOAP was a big deal at the time. They were right in wanting simplicity. They didn’t accomplish it, but they put simplicity in the name as sort of an aspirational thing. And so, when I started showing how JSON works, he was really threatened by that. And on his website, which was well-read at the time, he complained that, “this isn’t even XML. We should find who did this in string them up now”, which was a really ugly thing to say.
>Fortunately, nobody listens to Dave Winer, so I’m still here.
Dave's done some brilliant influential stuff, which Doug credits and I've written about before, but being annoying is Dave's brand, so Doug's "SOAP" joke is dead on. It's just as fair as referring to Marc Canter's "People Aggregator" as "People Aggravator".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20780928
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21170440
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224154
https://www.gawker.com/183778/people-aggravator-marc-canter-...
I did listen to the podcast lateron and was pleasantly surprised by the breadth of topics, although I have to admit I fell asleep halfway through (not because of the contents).
Thanks a lot for the money quotes! Casual conversation in English is still sometimes hard to listen to for me without focusing a lot.
> a clever program that he had written for the Macintosh called Frontier, in which he had a scripting language and an outliner and a word processor and a database, all in one program
Fascinating concept. I found a bit more info in an article about UserLand Software, which Dave Winer founded after leaving Symantec.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software#Frontier
> In January 1992 UserLand released version 1.0 of Frontier, a scripting environment for the Macintosh which included an object database and a scripting language named UserTalk. At the time of its original release, Frontier was the only system-level scripting environment for the Macintosh, but Apple was working on its own scripting language, AppleScript, and started bundling it with the MacOS 7 system software. As a consequence, most Macintosh scripting work came to be done in the less powerful, but free, scripting language provided by Apple.
> UserLand responded to Applescript by re-positioning Frontier as a Web development environment, distributing the software free of charge with the "Aretha" release of May 1995. In late 1996, Frontier 4.1 had become "an integrated development environment that lends itself to the creation and maintenance of Web sites and management of Web pages sans much busywork," and by the time Frontier 4.2 was released in January 1997, the software was firmly established in the realms of website management and CGI scripting, allowing users to "taste the power of large-scale database publishing with free software."
> Frontier's NewsPage suite came to play a pivotal role in the emergence of blogging through its adoption by Jorn Barger, Chris Gulker, and others in the 1997–98 period.
> UserLand launched a Windows version of Frontier 5.0 in January 1998 and began charging for licenses again with the 5.1 release of June 1998.
> Frontier subsequently became the kernel for two of UserLand's products, Manila and Radio UserLand, as well as Dave Winer's OPML Editor, all of which support the UserTalk scripting language.