I recently got the Postscript Red Book (the reference manual) as a gift from a good friend. He probably couldn't think of any reason to keep it. Postscript has found its niche in the printer world and has long since faded from the computing mainstream. It once was the API for displaying things on screen on NeXTstep in the form of Display Postscript and it was a fairly widespread 2D vector graphic file format in the form of EPS.
This all made me think back to an experiment with my wife and a possible new use for a language like Postscript (My friends and coworkers will love this blog entry. They know I'm a Postscript aficionado and their worst suspicions about this alleged PS fixation will be confirmed with this entry.) About a year ago my wife wanted to learn a little programming. She is a graphic and web designer, knows her tools of the trade like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash and the like. But since these things are becoming fairly scriptable with Javascript and Actionscript she wanted to start writing little programs.
This presented me with the task of how to explain to an absolute beginner what programming is all about. Believe it or not, after a few false starts with other languages I chose Postscript as the teaching language. Ok, stay with me and hear me out, it's not as crazy as it sounds.
