6 ms·

"but I can count the total number of software engineering advances they’ve made on one hand." I was just thinking the other day about the number of software en

by bonaldi 16y ago

"but I can count the total number of software engineering advances they’ve made on one hand." I was just thinking the other day about the number of software engineering advances they've made that I wish would fan out: - Hypercard - Dylan - MPW Shell (thank god for BBEdit) - Newton OS and its soups - Interface Builder (as opposed to code-generating IBs) - WebObjects (especially the tools) Sure, that's barely more than a single hand (and is less if you rule out NeXT things), but really, how many software engineering inventions do you want from a single firm?

MWinther 16y ago
I miss Hypercard. I would love to see something on that on the iPad. Of course, as things stand, it doesn't seem likely.
- jhancock 16y ago
  You'll have it by Q3...HP-Palm says its webOS tablet will be out then ;)
  - MWinther 16y ago
    Does webOS have hypercardish software?
    - jhancock 16y ago
      sort of...webOS, or more specifically, the mojo and ares framework/tools provide javascript libraries for doing hypercard-like things. The Palm Pre's main UX is very hypercard-like. Now that Ares is out, ares.palm.com, you get nice visual dev tools similar to what you had in hypercard.
- wmf 16y ago
  RunRev was inspired by HyperCard, although I don't know if they were planning to support authoring on the iPad or just running stacks. It's irrelevant now that Apple vaporized it. http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev-blog/revmobile-and-apples-iphone-sdk-agreement/ http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev-blog/revmobile-and-appl...
gecko 16y ago
What have they done recently, though? Every last thing you listed is from the 90s. And if we're looking at the 90s, I can add to that list with things that actually stuck around: ColorSync, QuickTime, TrueType, AppleScript, and more all come from that decade. But while Apple has made innovative stuff on the UI front recently, I can't even name one damn thing they've done technically that I found that impressive other than the new JIT in Safari. Hell, I honestly think that what Microsoft's doing with .NET and Azure is more technically sophisticated and interesting than anything coming out of Apple--especially on the Cocoa/CocoaTouch/Objective-C front. I think that's what's irritating Rentzsch so much, and to be honest, it really pisses me off, too. I don't mind if Apple doesn't want to be that innovative, but I take exception to being told that I'm not allowed to be innovative without their permission.
- protomyth 16y ago
  well, off the top of my head: Grand Central, clang, C blocks, and OpenCL.
  - grinich 16y ago
    I was at WWDC last year, and I was surprised at how hardcore their compiler guys are. LLVM/Clang is some amazing stuff. And blocks have been in development since at least summer '08.
    - jbarham 16y ago
      Well, if you want to talk about "hardcore compiler guys", I'd say that Google has the advantage since e.g. Ken Thompson and Rob Pike have chosen to work there and not at Apple. They are on the team that's developing Go and the pace of improvement is pretty remarkable. Rob Pike et al also developed Sawzall, a massively parallel data analysis language that's been in use in production at Google for several years. Google also developed a custom register based Java VM for Android. And they have a Java to JavaScript (!) compiler for Google Web Toolkit. Microsoft is doing more interesting work than Apple in developing production ready languages with e.g. Haskell (Simon Peyton-Jones is an MS researcher), .Net/C#, F#, IronPython. But unfortunately for MS they are tied to the albatross of Windows... LLVM/Clang might look impressive but AFAIK not even Apple is using it to ship production code. Proof of concept implementations are one thing, production quality shipping code is another.
abstractbill 16y ago
To be honest I don't care much whether they're actually innovating technically or not, but I do care that they are not picking up other peoples' technical innovations. Having to program in Objective C makes me feel like I'm back in the 90s again. It's embarrassingly bad.
- syoutsey 16y ago
  What, specifically, don't you like about it? I think it's a fine language.
  - cpr 16y ago
    Agreed. It's just Smalltalk with C control structures. (An odd but felicitous mismatch, if there ever were one.)
  - abstractbill 16y ago
    I suppose it's ok compared to something like C++, but coming from a more dynamic/functional preference (Common Lisp, Python, etc) I find Objective C clunky (my experience is in using it on the iPhone, so I'm really talking about the language as it is implemented on that platform). Reference counting memory management gets old and annoying very quickly. I'm glad to see what are effectively lambdas in iPhone OS 4, but wow it took a long time to get them! And the whole iPhone api requires delegate objects all over the place, so without lambdas or the ability to make some kind of anonymous inline class your code gets spread all over the place. I don't like header files, nor do I see the need for them in 2010 for crying out loud - I shouldn't have to write the same thing in two places just because a compiler isn't smart enough to figure it out. Overall I would prefer to just use C, if I need something really low level, or something much more high level if I don't (Common Lisp, Python, etc). Objective C straddles the two places badly imho.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - j_baker 16y ago
malkia 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder "Interface Builder first made its appearance in 1988 as part of NeXTSTEP 0.8. It was invented and developed by Jean-Marie Hullot, originally in Lisp (for the ExperLisp product by Expertelligence). It was one of the first commercial applications that allowed interface objects, such as buttons, menus, and windows, to be placed in an interface using a mouse. One notable early use of Interface Builder was the development of the WorldWideWeb web browser by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN using a NeXT workstation."

by bonaldi 16y ago

MWinther 16y ago

I miss Hypercard. I would love to see something on that on the iPad. Of course, as things stand, it doesn't seem likely.

jhancock 16y ago
You'll have it by Q3...HP-Palm says its webOS tablet will be out then ;)
- MWinther 16y ago
  Does webOS have hypercardish software?
  - jhancock 16y ago
    sort of...webOS, or more specifically, the mojo and ares framework/tools provide javascript libraries for doing hypercard-like things. The Palm Pre's main UX is very hypercard-like. Now that Ares is out, ares.palm.com, you get nice visual dev tools similar to what you had in hypercard.
wmf 16y ago
RunRev was inspired by HyperCard, although I don't know if they were planning to support authoring on the iPad or just running stacks. It's irrelevant now that Apple vaporized it. http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev-blog/revmobile-and-apples-iphone-sdk-agreement/ http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev-blog/revmobile-and-appl...

gecko 16y ago

What have they done recently, though? Every last thing you listed is from the 90s. And if we're looking at the 90s, I can add to that list with things that actually stuck around: ColorSync, QuickTime, TrueType, AppleScript, and more all come from that decade. But while Apple has made innovative stuff on the UI front recently, I can't even name one damn thing they've done technically that I found that impressive other than the new JIT in Safari. Hell, I honestly think that what Microsoft's doing with .NET and Azure is more technically sophisticated and interesting than anything coming out of Apple--especially on the Cocoa/CocoaTouch/Objective-C front. I think that's what's irritating Rentzsch so much, and to be honest, it really pisses me off, too. I don't mind if Apple doesn't want to be that innovative, but I take exception to being told that I'm not allowed to be innovative without their permission.

protomyth 16y ago
well, off the top of my head: Grand Central, clang, C blocks, and OpenCL.
- grinich 16y ago
  I was at WWDC last year, and I was surprised at how hardcore their compiler guys are. LLVM/Clang is some amazing stuff. And blocks have been in development since at least summer '08.
  - jbarham 16y ago
    Well, if you want to talk about "hardcore compiler guys", I'd say that Google has the advantage since e.g. Ken Thompson and Rob Pike have chosen to work there and not at Apple. They are on the team that's developing Go and the pace of improvement is pretty remarkable. Rob Pike et al also developed Sawzall, a massively parallel data analysis language that's been in use in production at Google for several years. Google also developed a custom register based Java VM for Android. And they have a Java to JavaScript (!) compiler for Google Web Toolkit. Microsoft is doing more interesting work than Apple in developing production ready languages with e.g. Haskell (Simon Peyton-Jones is an MS researcher), .Net/C#, F#, IronPython. But unfortunately for MS they are tied to the albatross of Windows... LLVM/Clang might look impressive but AFAIK not even Apple is using it to ship production code. Proof of concept implementations are one thing, production quality shipping code is another.

abstractbill 16y ago

To be honest I don't care much whether they're actually innovating technically or not, but I do care that they are not picking up other peoples' technical innovations. Having to program in Objective C makes me feel like I'm back in the 90s again. It's embarrassingly bad.

syoutsey 16y ago
What, specifically, don't you like about it? I think it's a fine language.
- cpr 16y ago
  Agreed. It's just Smalltalk with C control structures. (An odd but felicitous mismatch, if there ever were one.)
- abstractbill 16y ago
  I suppose it's ok compared to something like C++, but coming from a more dynamic/functional preference (Common Lisp, Python, etc) I find Objective C clunky (my experience is in using it on the iPhone, so I'm really talking about the language as it is implemented on that platform). Reference counting memory management gets old and annoying very quickly. I'm glad to see what are effectively lambdas in iPhone OS 4, but wow it took a long time to get them! And the whole iPhone api requires delegate objects all over the place, so without lambdas or the ability to make some kind of anonymous inline class your code gets spread all over the place. I don't like header files, nor do I see the need for them in 2010 for crying out loud - I shouldn't have to write the same thing in two places just because a compiler isn't smart enough to figure it out. Overall I would prefer to just use C, if I need something really low level, or something much more high level if I don't (Common Lisp, Python, etc). Objective C straddles the two places badly imho.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- j_baker 16y ago

malkia 16y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder "Interface Builder first made its appearance in 1988 as part of NeXTSTEP 0.8. It was invented and developed by Jean-Marie Hullot, originally in Lisp (for the ExperLisp product by Expertelligence). It was one of the first commercial applications that allowed interface objects, such as buttons, menus, and windows, to be placed in an interface using a mouse. One notable early use of Interface Builder was the development of the WorldWideWeb web browser by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN using a NeXT workstation."