by DonHopkins | 2025-10-07 15:54:40+00:00
There was also ELK Scheme, the Extension Language Kit, a scheme interpreter designed to be used as an extension language for other appllications.

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1994/...

>Elk, the Extension Language Kit, is a Scheme implementation that is intended to be used as a general, reusable extension language subsystem for integration into existing and future applications. Applications can define their own Scheme data types and primitives, providing for a tightly-knit integration of the CIC++ parts of the application with Scheme code. Library interfaces, for example to the UNIX operating system and to various X window system libraries, show the effectiveness of this approach. Several features of Elk such as dynamic loading of object files and freezing of fully customized applications into executables (implemented for those UNIX environments where it was feasible) increase its usability as the backbone of a complex application. Elk has been used in this way for seven years within a locally-developed ODA-based multimedia document editor; it has been used in numerous other projects after it could be made freely available five years ago.

Also Gnu Guile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile

>GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions[3] (GNU Guile) is the preferred extension language system for the GNU Project[4] and features an implementation of the programming language Scheme. Its first version was released in 1993.[1] In addition to large parts of Scheme standards, Guile Scheme includes modularized extensions for many different programming tasks.[5][6]

Also Winterp, which used XLisp:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/121994.121998

>Winterp is an interactive, language-based user-interface and application-construction environment enabling rapid prototyping of applications with graphical user interfaces based on the OSF/Motif UI Toolkit. Winterp also serves as a customization environment for delivered applications by providing a real programming language as an extension language. Many existing user-interface languages only have the expressive power to describe static layout of user interface forms; by using a high-level language for extensions and prototyping, Winterp also handles the dynamic aspects of UI presentation, e.g. the use of direct manipulation, browsers, and dialog. Winterp makes rapid prototyping possible because its language is based on an interpreter, thereby enabling interactive construction of application functionality and giving immediate feedback on incremental changes.Winterp's language is based on David Betz's public domain Xlisp interpreter which features a subset of Common Lisp's functionality. The language is extensible, permitting new Lisp primitives to be added in the C language and allowing hybrid implementations constructed from interpreted Lisp and compiled C. Hybrid implementation gives Winterp-based applications the successful extension and rapid-prototyping capabilities of Lisp-based environments, while delivering the multiprocessing perfor- mance of C applications running on personal Unix workstations.

And TCL/Tk of course!

https://www.tcl-lang.org/

And on the commercial side, there was Visix Galaxy, which was extensible in PostScript, inspired by NeWS:

https://www.ambiencia.com/products.php

https://0-hr.com/Wolfe/Programming/Visix.htm

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.java.programmer/c/LPkz...

https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/galaxy.html

https://wiki.c2.com/?SpringsAndStruts

>The Visix Galaxy project was a ridiculously overpriced and overfeatured portable GraphicalUserInterface. You could do things like swivel an entire panel full of their custom widgets 32 degrees clockwise, and it would render all its text at this new angle without jaggies. The company went out of business after gaining only a handful of customers. For USD$ 10,000 a seat they sure didn't see the OpenSource movement coming. Their last attempt before going under was (guess what?) a Java IDE.

Galaxy competed with Neuron Data Systems in the "cross platform gui framework" space (which got steamrolled by the web permanently and for a window of time Java):

https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/neuron.html

Here is a great overview of User Interface Software and Tools by Brad Myers:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/2001spring/lecture05too...

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/toolnames/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQbMwK_iyjX-wpu_Xw_H-3zL...