The story of Frontier is not over, amazingly

<p><i>As before I asked Claude.ai to do the show notes, from its point of view. I added links. As always if you really want to know what I said you have to listen to the podcast, not edited or changed in any way by AI. :-)</i></p><p>Dave hadn't recorded a podcast in a while, and this one is short — prompted by a project that, as he puts it, popped up out of thin air: getting a current version of Frontier running on modern hardware. Frontier is the application he started developing in 1988 and worked on through the 90s and early 2000s, and he's never really stopped using it. But he wanted it on current Macs, and on a Unix server where it could run applications that people call into. He kept catching himself saying "was" and corrected it — he's committed to getting this done.</p><p>The implementation is Node.js and Electron. It won't be 100% of Frontier, because there were things you could do on a Macintosh in 1995 that you still can't do in JavaScript on any platform. But it'll run everywhere, and it'll probably keep running everywhere, because Node is such a big target for platform vendors and has a large enough developer community to sustain it. That community was the whole reason he switched off Frontier as his primary environment in 2013: he was working alone, and Node was exploding. The sum of everyone else's work was too enormous to pass up.</p><p>How it started is the part I found remarkable. Dave, in a moment of curiosity, pointed Claude Code at the last Frontier <a href="https://github.com/tedchoward/Frontier">source release from 2011</a> and asked whether it could implement the <a href="https://daytona.scripting.com/search?q=usertalk">language</a> in JavaScript — and if it thought it could, to go ahead and do it. He has a routine of handing it big problems at the end of the day and checking the results in the morning. The next morning, it had done it. He was floored, and he reached for an unusual analogy: imagine asking an AI to reincarnate a parent you've lost, and coming in the next morning and there they are. It took him a week to calm down before moving on to the next layer up.</p><p>That next layer is where the real story is. Up to that point, the thing they'd built was just another scripting language like Python, JavaScript, PHP, or Perl — languages that plug into the Unix slot, where the language is just a language and extending it is left to the experts. Frontier is radically different, because it was born on the Macintosh, which in 1988 w