5 ms·

I was part of the original UNIX porting team at NeXT, and we were just trying to get the most popular non-proprietary operating system (UNIX) modernized (by usi

by MrTonyD 11y ago

I was part of the original UNIX porting team at NeXT, and we were just trying to get the most popular non-proprietary operating system (UNIX) modernized (by using Avie's CMU Mach) as the modern core to a standard OS. We didn't even think about any server type applications. And Steve told us that he was tired of being beaten-up at Apple for being closed source - so he wanted UNIX. (As an aside, he refused to allow any object-oriented tools in the system - but in Engineering we realized that Steve wouldn't know an object-oriented system from a hole in the ground, so we ignored his direct orders to not put in anything object oriented. The rest is history.)

feelix 11y ago
Why was he against object orientation?
- stcredzero 11y ago
  My guess: Back at that time, it was harder to afford the extra resources for OO. It's not until the time I graduated college that machines and VMs of managed environments started to get faster than "embarrassingly slow" in mainstream hands. This is also a big part of the reason why there were languages like Eiffel and also why C++ got so entrenched. Also explains the existence of Objective-C.
  - reagency 11y ago
    And indeed, even when Macs had faster hardware (early PowerPC), the Objective-C crippled performance. Windows crashed a lot (like Mac did before OS X), but it was fast because it had no isolation between components.
    - empthought 11y ago
      There was no Objective-C in Apple software in the days of "when Macs had faster hardware (early PowerPC)." The state-of-the art at OS X's release was the fourth-generation PowerPC, and there was only one more major iteration of the PowerPC used in Macs. I would call this "later PowerPC." "Early PowerPC" Macs couldn't run OS X.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        But there was Object Pascal and C++.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    > the extra resources for OO Thinking like this annoys me, because it assumes a specific implementation for OO. Are people conflating OO with Java? Are they conflating it with Smalltalk? Are they unaware you can write C in an OO style? > It's not until the time I graduated college that machines and VMs of managed environments started to get faster than "embarrassingly slow" in mainstream hands. Yes. People are apparently conflating OO with Java or Smalltalk.
    - cynicalkane 11y ago
      The GP is talking about what OO was like back at the time. What the heck are you complaining about? There were very few fast OO languages and they were emerging at the time. The most prominent examples of those languages are those languages GP names, and they do not exactly live up to the promises of even contemporary OO research, much less modern research.
      - asveikau 11y ago
        I share the poster's sentiment. OO is a mental box and a lot of people end up with overly narrow definitions or have trouble escaping the box thinking. You can apply the same ideas without language support. It is orthogonal to bytecodes, VMs, GC or even a "class" keyword. But a lot of people have very specific expectations and will have a hard time seeing this for what it is.
        collyw 11y ago
        Actually I think this is the beautiful thing about Perl 5's OOP support. It was clearly an after thought and a bit of a hack, but it works, and it makes it transparent how everything works. I had been taught Java at university before that, and the whole OOP thing was a bit of a hidden mystery. Perl gave me a far better understanding of OOP.
      - cbd1984 11y ago
        > What the heck are you complaining about? That mindset. Like I said. Did you not read my post?
  - jghn 11y ago
    OO was around since he late 60s. The reason it went away has less to do with compute power than people realize
  - jghn 11y ago
    OO was around since he late 60s. The reason it went away has less to do with compute power than people realize
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    The Mac OS introduced Object Pascal to the world and was later rewritten in a mix of C and C++, so I doubt that was the reason.
- secstate 11y ago
  Just a guess here, but true object-orientation is really hard to get right. It's not like OS X was going to be built on Smalltalk. And if you're going to half-ass OO with an implementation like structs+functions, you're usually better off sticking with a functional system. This is especially true when it comes to high availability services, like operating systems.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DefinitionsForOo http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DefinitionsForOo Given the above link, I deny there's any single useful definition for OO: It's been defined and redefined over and over again for decades, to the point people can't even agree on what languages are capable of writing software in an OO style.
- tacone 11y ago
  Probably because of the hype. He was promoting OO and thinking about it as a competitive advantage over the competition. He probably didn't want such "powerful" (?) software to be reused by them.
- MrTonyD 11y ago
  Steve didn't understand OO at the time. Not in the least. Steve was completely non-technical, and he knew that UNIX was standard and didn't want us putting something new and untested in it. I can't tell you how many times I tried to explain OO concepts to him (lots of us tried, over and over.) So, to him, an OO toolkit was something that would make us too complex for developers looking for an easily understood UNIX system. He told us that he was relying on people's existing understanding of UNIX - that would allow them to adopt our system.
  - feelix 11y ago
    There are always casualties when managers make decisions and policies based on things they have absolutely no understanding of. At least programmers were able to do it anyway with this particular case, as Steve had no way of knowing it was happening.
pazimzadeh 11y ago
Really interesting. What do you make of video like these? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kjtQnPqq2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kjtQnPqq2U https://youtu.be/SaJp66ArJVI?t=2m04s https://youtu.be/SaJp66ArJVI?t=2m04s
- MrTonyD 11y ago
  I remember those days, and I remember Steve saying many of those things. Steve didn't have any deep understanding of what he was saying, and he spent a lot of time working on the wording of those sentences - practicing them over and over with a few of us in Engineering and Product Management. He created those sentences based on what engineers were telling him - reformulating them into his personal style. Really, Steve would often say that he couldn't do what we were doing, but he could help sell it. He described himself as a marketing guy - and that is what he was.
  - yuhong 11y ago
    I wonder how he compared with John Sculley at this time.
reagency 11y ago
That is classic Jobs -- sort of techie but not understanding what any of the words mean, very demanding, and sensitive to the customers' biases.
- crusso 11y ago
  Thus proving that all our nerdy knowledge isn't as important as we think it is in order to be incredibly successful.
  - mwfunk 11y ago
    Very true. Our biases sometimes even get in the way of creating things that people want.
- simonh 11y ago
  At the time, and for a long time after, a lot of computer science types were arguing that everything should be implemented from the ground up in very high level OO languages and abstracted runtime environments and this was the inevitable way things would be. Just look at the discussion on HN right now about smalltalk. Java also came out of this mindset. But Steve came form a highly practical, nuts-and-bolts engineering mindset where perfect is the enemy of the good. So I think Steve's attitude has to be put into the context of that conflict. But as MrTonyD shows, there were people at NEXT who understood how to translate that attitude into practical terms. And to be fair to Steve that's because he knew how to hire absolutely tip-top talent and trust them to do their jobs right, even when they disagreed with him.
  - wtbob 11y ago
    > At the time, and for a long time after, a lot of computer science types were arguing that everything should be implemented from the ground up in very high level OO languages and abstracted runtime environments and this was the inevitable way things would be. I don't really see that they were wrong. After all, C and POSIX are also very high level and abstracted compared to the assembler-based OSes which existed before them. The big problem now is that to be a successful alternate OS one needs to be bug-for-bug compatible with POSIX, and have a C compiler, in addition to one's own language and OS. Perhaps recent years' developments in virtualisation and containerisation will make it easier for a non-Linux host to run a Linux kernel and hand containers to it as needed. Maybe one day OS and systems research will once again pay off.
yuhong 11y ago
I have been wondering what would happen if Apple did the Blue Box on NuKernel path instead of the Rhapsody/Mac OS X path for a while now.

by MrTonyD 11y ago

feelix 11y ago

Why was he against object orientation?

stcredzero 11y ago
My guess: Back at that time, it was harder to afford the extra resources for OO. It's not until the time I graduated college that machines and VMs of managed environments started to get faster than "embarrassingly slow" in mainstream hands. This is also a big part of the reason why there were languages like Eiffel and also why C++ got so entrenched. Also explains the existence of Objective-C.
- reagency 11y ago
  And indeed, even when Macs had faster hardware (early PowerPC), the Objective-C crippled performance. Windows crashed a lot (like Mac did before OS X), but it was fast because it had no isolation between components.
  - empthought 11y ago
    There was no Objective-C in Apple software in the days of "when Macs had faster hardware (early PowerPC)." The state-of-the art at OS X's release was the fourth-generation PowerPC, and there was only one more major iteration of the PowerPC used in Macs. I would call this "later PowerPC." "Early PowerPC" Macs couldn't run OS X.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      But there was Object Pascal and C++.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  > the extra resources for OO Thinking like this annoys me, because it assumes a specific implementation for OO. Are people conflating OO with Java? Are they conflating it with Smalltalk? Are they unaware you can write C in an OO style? > It's not until the time I graduated college that machines and VMs of managed environments started to get faster than "embarrassingly slow" in mainstream hands. Yes. People are apparently conflating OO with Java or Smalltalk.
  - cynicalkane 11y ago
    The GP is talking about what OO was like back at the time. What the heck are you complaining about? There were very few fast OO languages and they were emerging at the time. The most prominent examples of those languages are those languages GP names, and they do not exactly live up to the promises of even contemporary OO research, much less modern research.
    - asveikau 11y ago
      I share the poster's sentiment. OO is a mental box and a lot of people end up with overly narrow definitions or have trouble escaping the box thinking. You can apply the same ideas without language support. It is orthogonal to bytecodes, VMs, GC or even a "class" keyword. But a lot of people have very specific expectations and will have a hard time seeing this for what it is.
      - collyw 11y ago
        Actually I think this is the beautiful thing about Perl 5's OOP support. It was clearly an after thought and a bit of a hack, but it works, and it makes it transparent how everything works. I had been taught Java at university before that, and the whole OOP thing was a bit of a hidden mystery. Perl gave me a far better understanding of OOP.
    - cbd1984 11y ago
      > What the heck are you complaining about? That mindset. Like I said. Did you not read my post?
- jghn 11y ago
  OO was around since he late 60s. The reason it went away has less to do with compute power than people realize
- jghn 11y ago
  OO was around since he late 60s. The reason it went away has less to do with compute power than people realize
- pjmlp 11y ago
  The Mac OS introduced Object Pascal to the world and was later rewritten in a mix of C and C++, so I doubt that was the reason.
secstate 11y ago
Just a guess here, but true object-orientation is really hard to get right. It's not like OS X was going to be built on Smalltalk. And if you're going to half-ass OO with an implementation like structs+functions, you're usually better off sticking with a functional system. This is especially true when it comes to high availability services, like operating systems.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DefinitionsForOo http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DefinitionsForOo Given the above link, I deny there's any single useful definition for OO: It's been defined and redefined over and over again for decades, to the point people can't even agree on what languages are capable of writing software in an OO style.
tacone 11y ago
Probably because of the hype. He was promoting OO and thinking about it as a competitive advantage over the competition. He probably didn't want such "powerful" (?) software to be reused by them.
MrTonyD 11y ago
Steve didn't understand OO at the time. Not in the least. Steve was completely non-technical, and he knew that UNIX was standard and didn't want us putting something new and untested in it. I can't tell you how many times I tried to explain OO concepts to him (lots of us tried, over and over.) So, to him, an OO toolkit was something that would make us too complex for developers looking for an easily understood UNIX system. He told us that he was relying on people's existing understanding of UNIX - that would allow them to adopt our system.
- feelix 11y ago
  There are always casualties when managers make decisions and policies based on things they have absolutely no understanding of. At least programmers were able to do it anyway with this particular case, as Steve had no way of knowing it was happening.

pazimzadeh 11y ago

Really interesting. What do you make of video like these? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kjtQnPqq2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kjtQnPqq2U https://youtu.be/SaJp66ArJVI?t=2m04s https://youtu.be/SaJp66ArJVI?t=2m04s

MrTonyD 11y ago
I remember those days, and I remember Steve saying many of those things. Steve didn't have any deep understanding of what he was saying, and he spent a lot of time working on the wording of those sentences - practicing them over and over with a few of us in Engineering and Product Management. He created those sentences based on what engineers were telling him - reformulating them into his personal style. Really, Steve would often say that he couldn't do what we were doing, but he could help sell it. He described himself as a marketing guy - and that is what he was.
- yuhong 11y ago
  I wonder how he compared with John Sculley at this time.

reagency 11y ago

That is classic Jobs -- sort of techie but not understanding what any of the words mean, very demanding, and sensitive to the customers' biases.

crusso 11y ago
Thus proving that all our nerdy knowledge isn't as important as we think it is in order to be incredibly successful.
- mwfunk 11y ago
  Very true. Our biases sometimes even get in the way of creating things that people want.
simonh 11y ago
At the time, and for a long time after, a lot of computer science types were arguing that everything should be implemented from the ground up in very high level OO languages and abstracted runtime environments and this was the inevitable way things would be. Just look at the discussion on HN right now about smalltalk. Java also came out of this mindset. But Steve came form a highly practical, nuts-and-bolts engineering mindset where perfect is the enemy of the good. So I think Steve's attitude has to be put into the context of that conflict. But as MrTonyD shows, there were people at NEXT who understood how to translate that attitude into practical terms. And to be fair to Steve that's because he knew how to hire absolutely tip-top talent and trust them to do their jobs right, even when they disagreed with him.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > At the time, and for a long time after, a lot of computer science types were arguing that everything should be implemented from the ground up in very high level OO languages and abstracted runtime environments and this was the inevitable way things would be. I don't really see that they were wrong. After all, C and POSIX are also very high level and abstracted compared to the assembler-based OSes which existed before them. The big problem now is that to be a successful alternate OS one needs to be bug-for-bug compatible with POSIX, and have a C compiler, in addition to one's own language and OS. Perhaps recent years' developments in virtualisation and containerisation will make it easier for a non-Linux host to run a Linux kernel and hand containers to it as needed. Maybe one day OS and systems research will once again pay off.

yuhong 11y ago

I have been wondering what would happen if Apple did the Blue Box on NuKernel path instead of the Rhapsody/Mac OS X path for a while now.