Comment by bluedino
1 year ago
Mac OS development introduced me to Objective-C. Quirky, but I grew to like it. I think it was the first time I 'got' object-oriented programming. I had done Windows programming before and while it was 'fine', writing Mac OS GUI code was so nice. Probably a credit to the frameworks as much as the language, though.
What other choice did NeXT have?
C++ was invented about the time NeXT started. Microsoft didn't even release MFC until 1992.
C...yikes.
Pascal. Would Steve had went along with that?
>Pascal. Would Steve had went along with that?
I don't see why he couldn't have. It's a far more elegant language and it and other Wirth languages like Oberon have inspired several current programming languages. The standard programming language of the Lisa and Mac was Pascal, and Apple even added object oriented features to it as Clascal (earlier than Wirth's Oberon and not compatible with it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal
I did a bunch of iOS development for about 4 years. I found Objective-C way more productive than C++.
I'm not saying taking Objective-C was wrong.
There were many alternatives.
Pascal is language family. Xerox did Pascal like Cedar at around the same time. Thing Modula-2 existed. Next could have done something along those lines. I'm sure there were commercial versions of that kind of stuff floating around.
Smalltalk was a big family at the time. Lisp OO system were already common. There were lots of commercial version of that they could have licensed.
Sun with NeWS had a very extended PostScript that basically allowed you to write most of the application in it.
There was a lot of stuff going on back then already. History always hides how much stuff was actually happening. Sadly most of it isn't open source, so tons of great stuff goes into a historical blackhole.
My point is, with the amount of money Next was able to raise and invest in these systems, they could have gone a number of different ways. They made a reasonable discussion at the time.