Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

dang

A handful of past HN comments mention it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16631346 (March 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362115 (April 2015)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030798 (Jan 2014)

The 2018 comment links to https://www.eslsyndetic.com/Documentation/overview_of_respon....

From there I got to https://web.archive.org/web/20030220213927/http://www.eslsyn..., which makes it clear that Easel was renamed ESL and https://www.eslsyndetic.com is indeed its current incarnation. I guess that means it still exists.

View on HN

The 2003 date on archive.org makes it seem like Easel was renamed to ESL while ESL Investments was building its stake in (major Easel customer) Sears but well before ESL Investments took over Sears.

looks absolutely archaic.

    ESL is the world's most comprehensive development tool for easily connecting all of your current and legacy systems and presenting your users with an integrated and easy to use windows program.

    The latest versions of ESL are available to all of our customers with a support contract and are also available for a 30 day evaluation.

There are a few screenshots at: https://www.eslsyndetic.com/overview.htm

And it looks very dated -- old-style MDI interface and controls, System font everywhere, bare-bones interface... the discussion of "5250 and 3270 host sessions" doesn't exactly speak to its modernity either.

They may still be putting out builds.

The homepage shows a release from November.

Hopefully some current Easel devs chime in. I took a look at the docs, it has an interesting approach to userinterface event handling and there seems to be some special "Screen Scraping" facilities.

When you finish scrolling, it says:

  Copyright © 2002 - 2021 Esl Syndetic Ltd.
  All rights reserved
  Last modified: 19th May 2021

Oh man, seeing "SQL Wizard" brought back memories. Thanks for sharing.

> And it looks very dated -- old-style MDI interface and controls, System font everywhere, bare-bones interface...

Maybe it's just me because I am used to that interface, but it looks much more user-friendly than many of the modern apps I use:

1. I can tell at a glance what is clickable and what is not.

2. I can see the accelerator/shortcut keys for most of the elements.

3. Sections are grouped together, and on a single page. I don't have to click 'Next' to see the next three clickable widgets.

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. I assume all the people still using that language don’t give a whit about looks.

Not doubting it's dated, but that description exactly fits a lot of enterprise stuff today.

The quotes without the horizontal scroll:

> ESL is the world's most comprehensive development tool for easily connecting all of your current and legacy systems and presenting your users with an integrated and easy to use windows program.

> The latest versions of ESL are available to all of our customers with a support contract and are also available for a 30 day evaluation.

code quotes haven't had a horizontal scroll on HN for months (years?)

I remember that it used to scroll horizontally on mobile and was actually surprised when I saw the GP comment was wrapped even though it was formatted as code. Not sure whether I haven’t noticed the change before or if I saw it but forgot about it – either way I think it must be a relatively recent change.

I still prefer code formatting to only be used for code snippets, commands and command outputs though.

For quotes I like leading each quoted paragraph with a “>” sign and a space. Like we do in plain text emails. Same kind of thing that they talk about in http://catb.org/jargon/html/email-style.html

> was actually surprised when I saw the GP comment was wrapped even though it was formatted as code.

Same, when I saw it on a PC. Originally I saw it on a mobile app‡, which still uses horizontal scrolls - hence my comment.

‡ https://f-droid.org/bo/packages/nl.viter.glider/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com