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Yeah, definitely, the focus that Jobs' provided was far more important than the tech. I doubt Copland was going anywhere, though, no matter how much time they

by dilap 9y ago

Yeah, definitely, the focus that Jobs' provided was far more important than the tech. I doubt Copland was going anywhere, though, no matter how much time they gave it. The underlying tech of NextStep was just so much better than the classic macOS assembly/pascal, cooperative-multi-tasking, single-memory-sapce, GetNextEvent() universe. Just too hard a problem to try to modernize while still so closely tied to MacOS in your mind...they needed to make a clean break.

cmrdporcupine 9y ago
My understanding after reading a bunch of articles (now I'm an expert!) is that what became 'Carbon' in OSX was based in part on work done for Copland. And that API maintained reasonable good classic compatibility (at the source / API level) while modernizing it a whole bunch. And it shipped quite quickly after the coup, so it must have been based on something existing prior to it. But such was the politics of Apple under Jobs/Tevanian that the (quite esoteric by industry standards) Cocoa/Objective-C ecosystem was considered superior and Carbon was actively deprecated despite being quite successful with third party developers...
- dilap 9y ago
  Sure, Obj-C was esoteric, but also well-designed and impressively ahead of its time. Witness that a minor evolution of the same tech went on to form the foundation of iOS. Even now, with Apple trying to transition to Swift, it's unclear to me that's an overall win. The combination of C plus message-passing was inspired. So basically I agree Cocoa was better tech than Carbon. Carbon was popular with devs 'cuz that's what they were used to, and that's what their existing apps were written in...it was a great stop-gap measure, but wouldn't have provided nearly as good a foundation for the future (in my opinion).
  - cmrdporcupine 9y ago
    I dunno, after doing iOS development for two years, I was very unimpressed with ecosystem. The UI toolkit is actually surprisingly low level for what it is. But it has served Apple well overall I suppose. I think ObjC is a terrible language tho.

by dilap 9y ago

cmrdporcupine 9y ago

My understanding after reading a bunch of articles (now I'm an expert!) is that what became 'Carbon' in OSX was based in part on work done for Copland. And that API maintained reasonable good classic compatibility (at the source / API level) while modernizing it a whole bunch. And it shipped quite quickly after the coup, so it must have been based on something existing prior to it. But such was the politics of Apple under Jobs/Tevanian that the (quite esoteric by industry standards) Cocoa/Objective-C ecosystem was considered superior and Carbon was actively deprecated despite being quite successful with third party developers...

dilap 9y ago
Sure, Obj-C was esoteric, but also well-designed and impressively ahead of its time. Witness that a minor evolution of the same tech went on to form the foundation of iOS. Even now, with Apple trying to transition to Swift, it's unclear to me that's an overall win. The combination of C plus message-passing was inspired. So basically I agree Cocoa was better tech than Carbon. Carbon was popular with devs 'cuz that's what they were used to, and that's what their existing apps were written in...it was a great stop-gap measure, but wouldn't have provided nearly as good a foundation for the future (in my opinion).
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  I dunno, after doing iOS development for two years, I was very unimpressed with ecosystem. The UI toolkit is actually surprisingly low level for what it is. But it has served Apple well overall I suppose. I think ObjC is a terrible language tho.