Re: How's Stepstone/Objective-C doing?

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2 total messages Started by Cimarron D. Taylor </> Mon, 01 Apr 1991 08:48

#265

Author: Cimarron D. Taylor </>
Date: Mon, 01 Apr 1991 08:48

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	Brad Cox gave a talk here at Berkeley a few weeks ago.  I was
	given the impression that he was more interested in library
	developement than language development.  This is part of his
	philosophy of software reusability.

	In particular, when someone asked him why the NeXT machine's
	do not come with the Stepstone class library, he said that
	Jobs wasn't interested in it.  Jobs apparently thought the
	language was more important than the library, while Cox
	believes that the library is more important than the language.

	It is my belief that there is more money to be made, and more
	work to saved, through the development and sale of Objective C
	libraries as opposed to Objective C compilers.  The language
	itself is not really that complicated.  Someone with
	experience selling compiliers (say Borland or Microsoft)
	should easily be able to sell Turbo-Objective-C or whatever.

	Also, the IEOR department at berkeley has an experimental port
	of the Stepstone class library as part of their NeXT port of
	BLOCS, the Berkeley Library of Objects for Control and Simulation.
	I am not clear on what kind of agreement was made as to it's 
	distribution. 

	Cimarron Taylor
	Electronics Research Laboratory / POSTGRES project
	University of California, Berkeley
	cimarron@postgres.berkeley.edu

Re: How's Stepstone/Objective-C doing?

#270

Author: Roland Telfeyan
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 1991 15:21

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In message <CIMARRON.91Apr1004809@erewhon.postgres.Berkeley.EDU>
cimarron@erewhon.postgres.Berkeley.EDU (Cimarron D. Taylor </>) writes:

> Brad Cox gave a talk here at Berkeley a few weeks ago.  I was
> given the impression that he was more interested in library
> developement than language development.  This is part of his
> philosophy of software reusability.
> 
> In particular, when someone asked him why the NeXT machine's
> do not come with the Stepstone class library, he said that
> Jobs wasn't interested in it.  Jobs apparently thought the
> language was more important than the library, while Cox
> believes that the library is more important than the language.

That's all rhetoric.  The real reason NeXT decided not to include
the Stepstone class library is because it was too buggy.  Believe
me, I've been programming the NeXT since its Sun cross-development
system (System 0.3) in 1988, and at that time it *was* included.
Our application made extensive use of it.  I forget whether it was
in 6.0 or 8.0 that the Stepstone class library was removed.  I got
the impression NeXT got tired of taking bug reports for Stepstone!
So NeXT substituted its own foundation library, a smaller set of
objects, but useful and reliable.

Roland Telfeyan                             roland@cpat.umich.edu
School of Music                             roland@gomidas.mi.org
University of Michigan      1100 Baits, Ann Arbor, MI  48109-2085

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