On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 6:51 PM, John Zabroski <johnzabro...@gmail.com>wrote:
> That being said, I have no idea why people think Smalltalk-80 would have > been uniformly better than Java. I am not saying this to be negative. In > my view, much of the biggest mistakes with Java were requiring insane legacy > compatibility, and doing it in really bad ways. Swing should have never > have been forced to reuse AWT, for example. And AWT should never have had a > concrete component model, thus "forcing" Swing to inherit it (dropping the > rabbit ears, because I see no good explanation for why it had to inherit > AWT's component model via "implementation inheritance"). It's hard for me > to even guage if the Swing developers were good programmers or not, given > that ridiculously stupid constraint. It's not like Swing even supported > phones, it was never in J2ME. The best I can conclude is that they were not > domain experts, but who really was at the time? I started programming Swing a year ago and spent a little time learning its history when I first started. I was able to gather a few anecdotes, and they have fascinated me. There were two working next-generation Java GUI toolkits at the time of Swing's conception - Netscape's IFC and Lighthouse Design's LFC - both toolkits were developed by ex-NeXT developers and borrowed heavily from AppKit's design. IFC even had a design tool that mimicd Interface Builder (which still lives on today in Cocoa). Sun first acquired Lighthouse Design, then decided to join forces with Netscape - with two proven(?) toolkits, the politics worked out such that all the AWT people at Sun ended up leading the newly-joined team, and the working code from the other parties discarded, and from this, Swing was born. http://talblog.info/archives/2007/01/sundown.html http://www.noodlesoft.com/blog/2007/01/23/the-sun-also-sets/ -- Duncan.
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