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The way I view Nextstep is some pragmatic programmers were in awe of Smalltalk. Which isn't surprising everyone was in awe of smalltalk (SJ copied it to make th

The way I view Nextstep is some pragmatic programmers were in awe of Smalltalk. Which isn't surprising everyone was in awe of smalltalk (SJ copied it to make the Mac after all). Disappointed they couldn't have it, they went out, got a bottle of tequila and got drunk. Half way through the bottle one of them said "You know what? We could build Smalltalk on top of UNIX!". and thus was born obj-c and Nextstep. There are still things that nextstep is more than ahead of the bleeding edge with. Time tends to erase perspective. Here's an example: // get a connection to some server id server = [NXConnection connectToName: "exampleserver"]; // Then use objects on that server. List *aList; Widget *aWidget; aList = [server widgetList]; aWidget = [aList objectAt: 0]; NB: This example is fantastic for building distributed apps. BUT accessing objects made a local proxy copy of the object. So you wouldn't want to run your world weather model through it - it would copy gigabytes of data over the network. Also, as you can probably imagine it was horribly insecure, with no encryption. It was the late 80's, early 90's.

pjmlp 5y ago
Except that Objective-C originally did not have anything to do with NeXT, it was latter when NeXT a acquired a license to use it for NeXTSTEP. "The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332
twoodfin 5y ago
This isn’t so far from the truth. NeXT era Steve Jobs: I had three or four people who kept bugging me that I had my rear over the Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally went over there. They were very kind and they showed what they were working on, and they showed me three things. But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system, there were a hundred Alto computers, all networked, using e-mail, etc., etc.. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they’d shown me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life. The simplest way to explain NeXT is Steve getting back to those other two things after turning the first thing into a product with the Macintosh.

pjmlp 5y ago

Except that Objective-C originally did not have anything to do with NeXT, it was latter when NeXT a acquired a license to use it for NeXTSTEP. "The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332

twoodfin 5y ago

This isn’t so far from the truth. NeXT era Steve Jobs: I had three or four people who kept bugging me that I had my rear over the Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally went over there. They were very kind and they showed what they were working on, and they showed me three things. But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system, there were a hundred Alto computers, all networked, using e-mail, etc., etc.. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they’d shown me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life. The simplest way to explain NeXT is Steve getting back to those other two things after turning the first thing into a product with the Macintosh.