I would like to see someone reimplement NeWS now. Hardware is way faster and we have more choices of embedded interpreter. Not that PostScript was, and is, not genius for that purpose, but there choices.
Also, Don Hopkins hangs out on HN, where he's already weighed in a few times with some ideas for future work if you grok through his comments.
On the contrary, PostScript was a brilliant choice for scripting your window system at the time (≈1990). The modern crop of dynamic languages hadn't matured (JS, Guile, Python, Perl, Ruby, even Tcl), so the only real alternative would have been a Lisp, and PostScript already had a truly great graphics API — an improvement in many ways over many of its successors, including X11 and Windows GDI. Gosling certainly could have implemented something like Emacs Lisp, and it would have been easier to program in than PostScript, but it also would have been painfully slow, and he would have had to do the graphics API design work — and probably fucked it up, as the Win16 and X11 teams did. Even today, PostScript interpreters are quite a bit faster than most of the language implementations I described above, though modern JS, LuaJIT, Self, and of course HotSpot Java do beat them.
Also, Don Hopkins hangs out on HN, where he's already weighed in a few times with some ideas for future work if you grok through his comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...