There’s a (short, I think) chapter missing from this story. I attended a public
(technical) talk in Town Hall (I think it’s called) at Apple shortly before or
after I went to work there. It would have been around 2000-2001.
The speaker’s message was that the future of the desktop was Java. A pretty big
surprise and unwelcome news for those of us who saw Apple as the future of
Objective-C and the NeXTStep lineage rather than the other way around. As the
talk went on, it came out that the speaker was the manager of the compiler
group responsible for Java and Objective-C — and had been going back to early
NeXT days. So one had to conclude that he was committed to the course he
described. People tried to ask about Objective-C (vs. Java) and he said that
Objective-C was done, he clearly didn’t want to talk about that.
This before the public release of Mac OS X 10.0.
Another effort that sank in the deep blue sea.
I think one has to assume that technology strategy at Apple is less disciplined
by the business side than at companies like IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, etc.
And within Apple, there is a certain amount of chaos within Engineering that
gets exposed from time to time. I think they might feel that’s a good thing. If
you’re thinking like a business person, you should accept this as a given and
make your decisions accordingly. If you’re thinking like a person who likes the
technology, you may or may not reach the same conclusions. But I don’t think
you’re going to change the way Apple does things.
Me, I still don’t understand why, given the long history of support at
Apple/NeXT for C++ and the maturity of the compilers available, there is any
need for Swift. But there it is. Or, there they are. Perhaps this is the way
the younger generation overtthrows the older? Or not, but I’m pretty sure there
is no compelling business argument for it.
Tom
> On Oct 11, 2019, at 2:54 PM, Charles Srstka via Cocoa-dev
> <cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com> wrote:
>
>> On Oct 11, 2019, at 12:44 AM, Jens Alfke <j...@mooseyard.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Oct 10, 2019, at 6:18 PM, Richard Charles via Cocoa-dev
>>> <cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Just a guess but perhaps management had an awakening when they found the
>>> time and effort expended to write the next even better version of Finder in
>>> Carbon was substantially more difficult and costly that the prior Cocoa
>>> version.
>>
>> The only Cocoa—>Carbon Finder transition I know of was before 10.0 shipped.
>> The development versions had a NeXT file manager with a Mac UI skin, but
>> before release that was replaced with a Carbon-ized port of (a subset of)
>> the MacOS 9 Finder. That Finder lived on for a few years before being
>> replaced by a new rewritten Cocoa version.
>>
>> —Jens
>
> The NeXT/Rhapsody file manager was what I was referring to.
>
> As for the 10.0 Finder, I’m sure it shared code with the OS 9 finder, but it
> was an essentially new app based on PowerPlant (which the OS 9 Finder, to the
> best of my knowledge, was not). It did not feel much like the OS 9 Finder,
> and it was missing a lot of basic functionality that the OS 9 Finder had had,
> much of which was gradually reintroduced over the years. The Cocoa rewrite of
> the Finder did not appear until Snow Leopard was released in 2009. Notably,
> the Finder was still Carbon when Apple suddenly out of nowhere (again, from
> the perspective of an outsider) dropped the previously promised 64-bit Carbon
> support in 2007.
>
> As for the Dock, there was no OS 9 analogue to that at all, so the only
> conclusion can be that it was rewritten in Carbon from the ground up, when a
> Cocoa one had been previously available. This is difficult to explain other
> than as a statement of confidence in Carbon.
>
> Charles
>
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