4 ms·

Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs [pdf] (1994)

77 points by ingve 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dang 3y ago
Small but related: Well-mannered OOP design (Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850209 - Sept 2022 (3 comments) Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148782 - July 2016 (2 comments)
vaxman 3y ago
Put this in a paper bag and slam it against the wall behind a door that's usually propped open until it is dead. The Taligent/Copeland/OpenDoc debacle cost many small developers their livelihoods. Do you think $3T Apple would look back and cut some checks to the devs they "care deeplyed" with decisions like this? ["In 1981, Jobs refused to give founding stock to Apple employee number 12, Dan Kottke. Woz reportedly intervened, offering to match whatever options Jobs was willing to spare for Kottke. “OK,” Jobs replied, “I will give him zero.” --sort'a set the tone...] https://youtu.be/lmc21V-zBq0 https://youtu.be/lmc21V-zBq0
neilv 3y ago
I don't know about their methodology, but they had a good demo around then. Jack Grimes did a big presentation on Taligent to my employer, where I was working on next-gen OO dev tools. After seeing the Taligent demo, I immediately volunteered to be involved if we did anything with them. I saw Taligent as an OO application framework/platform, which, if it was going to be big, maybe we could use as a target for higher-level application analysis and design tools we'd provide. And maybe we could also use it as an application framework for implementing our tools themselves.
smackeyacky 3y ago
This was a wild time to be working in IT, not for what got shipped (spoiler, none of it did) but for the outlandish claims and bullshit that got tossed around trying to get other companies to stop investing in existing tech. Taligent. pink blah blah. Like they weaponised the Osborne effect against competitors.
- pohl 3y ago
  This is accurate. NeXT was sitting right there but Taligent, Pink, and Cairo sucked all the oxygen. It’s kind of funny how NeXT won in the long run by acquiring Apple for a negative 430 million and re-skinning as macOS.
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    While NeXT wasn't a big commercial success, they were wise to innovate on a boring foundation (Mach/BSD, PostScript, Objective-C) while architecture astronauts working on Taligent, Cairo, and Copland were off reinventing the wheel.
w10-1 3y ago
This particular document is mainly about how to use C++ carefully, and much of the advice is surprisingly pertinent and still in use today. This document doesn't convey what was unique about Taligent: it pushed one of the earliest open-doc application models, where a document could be composed of components unknown to the application because they came with all the code necessary to edit and manipulate it. It also pushed Apple's Copland team into a HAL that helped the transitions to PowerPC and Objective-C, fwiw. Unfortunately, internet MIME types did a much better job of creating open standards, and by 1996 Java was promising to run code in browsers. NT was clearly going to survive any IBM alternatives, and MS was playing frenemy with Sun/JavaSoft to keep Solaris as a headache for IBM. It's not clear Taligent was ever intended by its funders as anything other than a bargaining chip, against MS and Copland tech leads.
atombender 3y ago
Bill Gates attending the Taligent booth at Comdex 1994 and yawning for 8 seconds straight: https://youtu.be/IGOHIFwF3CI?t=195 https://youtu.be/IGOHIFwF3CI?t=195.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I Remember this. We had all the Taligent books in our library. Waaay too much structure (and I like structure). One of the things that struck me, was all the fairly basic stuff you couldn’t do, without getting a sign-off from an architect. It must have been kind of miserable, to be an architect, there.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > Waaay too much structure You aren't kidding. The table of contents alone has 20 pages. All concrete advice, assertively stating "your code must look this way". The advice looks kinda sensible, but that lot of rules can't work as a group.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    I’m comfortable with lots of structure (I worked for a “classic” Japanese corporation, for many years), but I have come to understand that I’m very much in the minority. I’ve learned that it’s very important to “sneak” structure into the mix, so folks adopt it without thinking. Designing good affordances, simple documentation, and sparse UX are important. I feel that developer tools and documentation are often way more complicated than they could be, and that we often avoid applying the same kind of UX work, as we do, with regular end-user applications.
fmajid 3y ago
Given Taligent’s utter failure, not just as a business but also at delivering anything approaching useful software, only useful as a source of anti-patterns and what not to do. Anti-Pattern No. 1: process is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
- Angostura 3y ago
  I’m not sure I agree with your belief that we live in a world where all ventures and software succeed or fail based entirely on their merits.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Dogma has always been a popular means to promote the latest fads in snake oil and conslutancy services. "Those who can do, do. Those who can't, teach."
  - rahoulb 3y ago
    Totally off-topic but I really dislike the phrase "Those who can do, do. Those who can't, teach." It implies that teaching isn't a skill of its own. Some of the best football coaches were mediocre players (Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho) and some of the best players turned out to be very poor coaches (Steven Gerrard springs to mind at the moment). Can you only learn physics from someone who has made a world-changing discovery, or learn to write from a best-selling author? Or do you learn from someone who knows just enough to guide you in the right direction with enthusiasm and correct your mistakes in a way that doesn't make you feel like a failure? What is correct is dogma in software development is a problem - software is too malleable and the world changes too fast to allow one set of ideas to dominate everything. That lesson hadn't even been thought about in the 90s though.
    - userbinator 3y ago
      The implication I have in mind is that many of those who teach are doing it because they can earn $$$ better that way than by actually practicing what they preach. Expensive consulting services, training courses, books, videos, etc. It's not about whether any of that stuff actually works; it's about essentially creating a religion and extracting profit from the gullible.
jakedata 3y ago
WHAT DRIVING TO THE STORE WOULD BE LIKE IF OPERATING SYSTEMS RAN YOUR CAR From http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/library/humor/DrivingOS.html http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/library/hu... Taligent/Pink: You walk to the store with Ricardo Montalban, who tells you how wonderful it will be when he can fly you to the store in his Learjet. Of course operating systems DO run our cars now. I would add Modern cars: You pay your monthly subscription that allows you to unlock your car after it won't let you in. After entering your destination in the nav system you must sit through five minutes of store-related advertising on your dashboard before you can leave because you can't afford to upgrade to the ad-free tier. You are escorted to the store by a fleet of surveillance drones, several of which follow you around and scan everything you look at. Halfway home the car stops and makes you watch another five minutes of advertising about products related to your purchases.
antonvs 3y ago
This is basically control freaks trying to turn development into a cookie-cutter exercise. If it really was a cookie-cutter exercise, you wouldn't need developers. You'd just write the program to implement your rules. Lack of self-awareness is the Achilles heel of people who write this kind of material.
- belter 3y ago
  Sprints, Daily Scrums...(cough...cough...)
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    When scrum becomes all about the process and shipping things is secondary then scrum sucks. The sad part is you can add/remove most parts of scrum that you do not care about. Yet everyone seems to add everything in then never does the checkback to see if it actually did any good or just wasted everyone's time. The worst ones are the big corps that foist the whole process on groups with the hundreds of hours of 'training' and 150 page slide decks to go with it with no real reasoning as to why they are doing it.
  - ikari_pl 3y ago
    my project is an uncoordinated catastrophe. I miss scrum.
    - bvrmn 3y ago
      More probable you miss proper manager/product owner.
bluedino 3y ago
Was it Taligent where Steve Jobs was talking about being at a trade show or demo and they wrote all this code for a half hour and didn't even have a window on the screen so he just left?
- whartung 3y ago
  Well, I’ll tell you what. I did sit through a Taligent presentation at COMDEX for 20-30 minutes and have no real memory of it other than it happened. But I distinctly recall the first time I saw a NeXT machine.

77 points by ingve 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dang 3y ago

Small but related: Well-mannered OOP design (Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850209 - Sept 2022 (3 comments) Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148782 - July 2016 (2 comments)

vaxman 3y ago

Put this in a paper bag and slam it against the wall behind a door that's usually propped open until it is dead. The Taligent/Copeland/OpenDoc debacle cost many small developers their livelihoods. Do you think $3T Apple would look back and cut some checks to the devs they "care deeplyed" with decisions like this? ["In 1981, Jobs refused to give founding stock to Apple employee number 12, Dan Kottke. Woz reportedly intervened, offering to match whatever options Jobs was willing to spare for Kottke. “OK,” Jobs replied, “I will give him zero.” --sort'a set the tone...] https://youtu.be/lmc21V-zBq0 https://youtu.be/lmc21V-zBq0

neilv 3y ago

I don't know about their methodology, but they had a good demo around then. Jack Grimes did a big presentation on Taligent to my employer, where I was working on next-gen OO dev tools. After seeing the Taligent demo, I immediately volunteered to be involved if we did anything with them. I saw Taligent as an OO application framework/platform, which, if it was going to be big, maybe we could use as a target for higher-level application analysis and design tools we'd provide. And maybe we could also use it as an application framework for implementing our tools themselves.

smackeyacky 3y ago

This was a wild time to be working in IT, not for what got shipped (spoiler, none of it did) but for the outlandish claims and bullshit that got tossed around trying to get other companies to stop investing in existing tech. Taligent. pink blah blah. Like they weaponised the Osborne effect against competitors.

pohl 3y ago
This is accurate. NeXT was sitting right there but Taligent, Pink, and Cairo sucked all the oxygen. It’s kind of funny how NeXT won in the long run by acquiring Apple for a negative 430 million and re-skinning as macOS.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  While NeXT wasn't a big commercial success, they were wise to innovate on a boring foundation (Mach/BSD, PostScript, Objective-C) while architecture astronauts working on Taligent, Cairo, and Copland were off reinventing the wheel.

w10-1 3y ago

This particular document is mainly about how to use C++ carefully, and much of the advice is surprisingly pertinent and still in use today. This document doesn't convey what was unique about Taligent: it pushed one of the earliest open-doc application models, where a document could be composed of components unknown to the application because they came with all the code necessary to edit and manipulate it. It also pushed Apple's Copland team into a HAL that helped the transitions to PowerPC and Objective-C, fwiw. Unfortunately, internet MIME types did a much better job of creating open standards, and by 1996 Java was promising to run code in browsers. NT was clearly going to survive any IBM alternatives, and MS was playing frenemy with Sun/JavaSoft to keep Solaris as a headache for IBM. It's not clear Taligent was ever intended by its funders as anything other than a bargaining chip, against MS and Copland tech leads.

atombender 3y ago

Bill Gates attending the Taligent booth at Comdex 1994 and yawning for 8 seconds straight: https://youtu.be/IGOHIFwF3CI?t=195 https://youtu.be/IGOHIFwF3CI?t=195.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I Remember this. We had all the Taligent books in our library. Waaay too much structure (and I like structure). One of the things that struck me, was all the fairly basic stuff you couldn’t do, without getting a sign-off from an architect. It must have been kind of miserable, to be an architect, there.

marcosdumay 3y ago
> Waaay too much structure You aren't kidding. The table of contents alone has 20 pages. All concrete advice, assertively stating "your code must look this way". The advice looks kinda sensible, but that lot of rules can't work as a group.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  I’m comfortable with lots of structure (I worked for a “classic” Japanese corporation, for many years), but I have come to understand that I’m very much in the minority. I’ve learned that it’s very important to “sneak” structure into the mix, so folks adopt it without thinking. Designing good affordances, simple documentation, and sparse UX are important. I feel that developer tools and documentation are often way more complicated than they could be, and that we often avoid applying the same kind of UX work, as we do, with regular end-user applications.

fmajid 3y ago

Given Taligent’s utter failure, not just as a business but also at delivering anything approaching useful software, only useful as a source of anti-patterns and what not to do. Anti-Pattern No. 1: process is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Angostura 3y ago
I’m not sure I agree with your belief that we live in a world where all ventures and software succeed or fail based entirely on their merits.
userbinator 3y ago
Dogma has always been a popular means to promote the latest fads in snake oil and conslutancy services. "Those who can do, do. Those who can't, teach."
- rahoulb 3y ago
  Totally off-topic but I really dislike the phrase "Those who can do, do. Those who can't, teach." It implies that teaching isn't a skill of its own. Some of the best football coaches were mediocre players (Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho) and some of the best players turned out to be very poor coaches (Steven Gerrard springs to mind at the moment). Can you only learn physics from someone who has made a world-changing discovery, or learn to write from a best-selling author? Or do you learn from someone who knows just enough to guide you in the right direction with enthusiasm and correct your mistakes in a way that doesn't make you feel like a failure? What is correct is dogma in software development is a problem - software is too malleable and the world changes too fast to allow one set of ideas to dominate everything. That lesson hadn't even been thought about in the 90s though.
  - userbinator 3y ago
    The implication I have in mind is that many of those who teach are doing it because they can earn $$$ better that way than by actually practicing what they preach. Expensive consulting services, training courses, books, videos, etc. It's not about whether any of that stuff actually works; it's about essentially creating a religion and extracting profit from the gullible.

jakedata 3y ago

WHAT DRIVING TO THE STORE WOULD BE LIKE IF OPERATING SYSTEMS RAN YOUR CAR From http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/library/humor/DrivingOS.html http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/library/hu... Taligent/Pink: You walk to the store with Ricardo Montalban, who tells you how wonderful it will be when he can fly you to the store in his Learjet. Of course operating systems DO run our cars now. I would add Modern cars: You pay your monthly subscription that allows you to unlock your car after it won't let you in. After entering your destination in the nav system you must sit through five minutes of store-related advertising on your dashboard before you can leave because you can't afford to upgrade to the ad-free tier. You are escorted to the store by a fleet of surveillance drones, several of which follow you around and scan everything you look at. Halfway home the car stops and makes you watch another five minutes of advertising about products related to your purchases.

antonvs 3y ago

This is basically control freaks trying to turn development into a cookie-cutter exercise. If it really was a cookie-cutter exercise, you wouldn't need developers. You'd just write the program to implement your rules. Lack of self-awareness is the Achilles heel of people who write this kind of material.

belter 3y ago
Sprints, Daily Scrums...(cough...cough...)
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  When scrum becomes all about the process and shipping things is secondary then scrum sucks. The sad part is you can add/remove most parts of scrum that you do not care about. Yet everyone seems to add everything in then never does the checkback to see if it actually did any good or just wasted everyone's time. The worst ones are the big corps that foist the whole process on groups with the hundreds of hours of 'training' and 150 page slide decks to go with it with no real reasoning as to why they are doing it.
- ikari_pl 3y ago
  my project is an uncoordinated catastrophe. I miss scrum.
  - bvrmn 3y ago
    More probable you miss proper manager/product owner.

bluedino 3y ago

Was it Taligent where Steve Jobs was talking about being at a trade show or demo and they wrote all this code for a half hour and didn't even have a window on the screen so he just left?

whartung 3y ago
Well, I’ll tell you what. I did sit through a Taligent presentation at COMDEX for 20-30 minutes and have no real memory of it other than it happened. But I distinctly recall the first time I saw a NeXT machine.