Comment by cxr
1 year ago
I highly recommend the Steve Naroff interview. It's 6 hours in two parts, but it's worth the investment.
Not listed here, but also available, is the oral history of Brad Cox and the later Objective-C paper authored by Naroff, Cox, Hsu (the author of the linked blog post) for HOPL IV. Someone else will have to dig up the links.
You can also find interviews by other NeXTSteppers on the CHM site like Avi Tevanian and others. I think the Naroff one is best.
I always found Objective-C really elegant, due to its Smalltalk influence. I once read about Brad Cox explaining that the initial prototype was just one or two pages of C code to add objects and messaging. It was interesting to discover that Erlang had a similar origin story, with a thin layer built on top of Prolog [1]. Does a similar description of early Objective-C exist? I couldn't find a pointer in the videos.
[1] https://www.labouseur.com/courses/erlang/history-of-erlang-a....
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332 - The Origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its Evolution at NeXT by Brad J. Cox, Steve Naroff, and Hansen Hsu, from HOPL IV
Thanks for mentioning this! I watched the first part and just started on part 2. Very interesting!