Matrix history

We stumbled on the reactive library Matrix twenty-five years ago, when it began life as Semaphor. That origin story is here, and actually gives the reader a solid grounding in the spirit of what became Cells, the key reactive component of Matrix.

Later we discovered very close prior art in another Common Lisp project, Garnet KR.

The stack then was Common Lisp and Mac OS9 desktop Quickdraw. We then switched to Windows 7 and GDT and executed a 100kloc project to manage clinical trials. That story is here. A few years later, I returned to an ed tech project and moved to a Web stack, driving qooxdoo JS still from Common Lisp. The result can be seen at Tilton's Algebra.

Ten years ago, we ported Matrix to Clojure and ClojureScript, and then native Javascript. With Flutter/MX we introduce a ClojureDart version.

Until now we have not documented or promoted what we now call Matrix. That is our current task.