On Nov 12, 2007 11:07 AM, Christopher Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Well, but they *did* write a browser in Objective-C: > > http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/ > > I love almost everything the Omni guys do. That said, last I used that > thing it had trouble with all kinds of websites. Has it come along since > then?
Based on reviews, it has. But I haven't used it myself as I tend to oscillate between Safari and Firefox. > >> In fact, browsers were written in many of the languages I mentioned, and > >> they all tended to suck compared to Netscape or even second tier browers > >> like Mosaic, IE, and Cello. There was a reason the Netscape folks chose > >> C++ from all the language choices they had back then. > > > > And popularity was one of them. > > Popularity of a programming language comes from somewhere. If C++ is > really that horrible and unworkable, people wouldn't use it for > projects. Sure, it is far from perfect, but it seems to fall in to the > "good enough" category more often than not. Then we can at least agree that C++ is like Windows. :-) > > And cross platform was another. With some work, you can get C++ to run > > on Windows and Unix. Back then that wasn't the case with, for example, > > Delphi. > > Hey, cross platform is an entirely valid and fantastic feature of a > language. Indeed, it is what makes putting up with all those annoying > differences between implementations worth it. ;-) Agreed. > But your mention of the huge Mozilla rewrite is exactly my point. They > ended up keeping basically zero code from the original code base, so it > was effectively rewritten from scratch in 1998. They, or someone else, > *could* have implemented a browser in some other language at that point, > and been at no additional disadvantage compared to the Mozilla project > (and presumably would have an advantage since they had a significantly > better programming language to work with). Despite this, Mozilla ended > up being the #2 browser out there, and probably one of the best working > ones. All of the ones that I think of even coming close to it are also > written in C++: IE, Opera, and KHTML-based browsers. Hey, I don't know why Objective-C didn't take off. I don't know why Windows is more popular than Linux and Mac put together. But I know that those technologies that I like are more capable than their popular and tortuous alternatives. > > Objective-C has been a better language than C++ this whole time, but > > it's not the most popular. > > Again, I'm not arguing that C++ is the best language. Far from it. I'm > merely suggesting that it isn't quite so completely useless. It is > popular to trash it largely because it is so widely used. Sure other > languages are better (indeed, because of C++'s popularity, it nearly > impossible for a language that is worse than C++ to survive as anything > but a niche or legacy language), but they clearly aren't overwhelmingly so. It's also popular to trash it because it sucks. :-) See: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html By the way, I once became so fed up with crashes in KMail (back when I used Linux as my desktop) that I filed a bug report contending that something as important as a mail client should be done in a "protected programming language", such as Python or Java, so that (a) crashes were accompanied by a timely, accurate stack trace and (b) corruption of data was less likely. My bug report was immediately tagged as WONTFIX or NOTABUG or something like that and closed. :-) -Chuck -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
