Wow! Thanks for that amazing nugget of Internet history. Fun fact: Tony Duarte wrote the book Writing NeXT Programs under the pseudonym Ann Weintz because supposedly Steve Jobs was so secretive that he told employees not to write books about the ideas in NeXT's GUI. See: http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Next-Programs-Introduction-Nextstep/dp/0963190105/where Tony comments on it.
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Duncan Mak <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 6:51 PM, John Zabroski <[email protected]>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. > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > >
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