begin quoting David M. Cook as of Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 06:01:08PM -0800: > On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 11:38:57AM -0800, Christian Seberino wrote: > > I remember many years ago hearing a presentation on the NeXT > > computer. The scientist was enthralled at the ease of development > > of software on a NeXT. > > Gnustep and Apple's Cocoa are descendents of the NextStep API (most of the > core essentially unchanged AFAIK). Objective C is an attempt to bring Smalltalk-style thinking to the C language; it might not be a bad thing to try out Smalltalk. (Although it's an operating-system-hostile language -- the opinion is that an operating system is only necessary if the language you're using is weak.)
> > Besides Objective C does anyone know what made NeXT software > > development so easy? > > The NextStep developers understood OOP from the beginning, and had a > dynamic OOPL to work with. The heavy use of delegation, for example, makes > implementing behavior really easy. Check out how simple implementing a table > or tree is. Perhaps we can discuss Objective C and the Foundation classes in lpsg? > If you have access to a machine running OS X, try working thru the tutorial > for Interface Builder. On a unix machine you can try Gnustep, which has an > implementation of the original Inteface Builder called Gorm. The problem I have with Interface Builder is that it (a) is very clunky and (b) doesn't generate source. So you can't build something simple and look at the syntax... it builds objects, and basically serializes 'em. Gorm does the same thing. Bleah. So to figure out how to write GUI apps, you have to grok the whole thing at once, or you have to use funky builder-tools. (Mouse use causes all sorts of problems in my arm, shoulder, and neck; naturally, I'm not at all eager to use a you-must-use-a-mouse-for-everything tool. The computer ought not to cause one pain.) Maybe there's an option to Interface Builder or Gorm that will generate the source instead -- I'd be overjoyed to hear about it. But none of my OS X programming books have any indication of such an option, and walking through the menus wasn't very productive. [snip] > > How do modern Linux development environments compare to NeXT magic? GNUStep is there, although the make-system is kinda clunky. Don't know how the make system relates to NeXT -- I only lusted after 'em, never did get one. > I'd love to know about any UI APIs that are as elegant. Most are pretty > clunky and overcomplicated <cough, Swing, cough> in comparison. I like layout managers. (Probably why I loved Tcl/Tk when I first encountered it. Alas, I haven't done much with Tcl/Tk since, but I have no fear I could get up to speed in a short amount of time, it's so easy.) >From my point of view, Swing is less clunkly than the Cocoa libraries, but that's probably just because they're well-documented. Given surperb documentation, you can put up with just about any wart. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
