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Adam Fedor of GNUstep Says Stuff

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-about-things dept.

JgiSaw writes "GNUstep provides an Object-Oriented application development framework and tool set for use on a wide variety of computer platforms. It is based on the original OpenStep specification provided by NeXT, Inc. (now owned by Apple and endorced into MacOSX). OSNews is hosting an interview with Adam Fedor, of the GNUstep project, where Adam mentions among others that GnuStep has support for the MacOSX API too, which will make porting MacOSX applications to Linux much easier."

4 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. macos x api by geomcbay · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Its kind of cool that it supports the OS X API, but how useful is that in practice? There's hardly any apps that use the OS X APIs right now, and of the ones that exist the developers haven't really shown much interest in supporting Linux...

  2. GNUStep by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I haven't used GNUStep recently, but I can tell you that, unlike KDE or GNOME, GNUStep has the capability to bring real applications to linux land.

    There are a lot of NeXT developers who would love to port their applications. It would have been a real coupe if GNUStep was ready for prime time before OS X, but, oh well.

    My only concern over it was that it used that dog display ghostscript. If you use Solaris, the Sun XWindow server has builtin support for display postscript. It's too bad the Open Source community has a "{XWindows|Display Ghostscript | | etc} sucks, but it's good enough, so why try to build a replacement" mentality. Fortunately, there are people like Adam who say "Fuck that, I don;t want to wallow in mediocracy".

    Long live GNUStep!!

  3. the genius of the NeXT api by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    One thing was done real well. Principle of least astonishment. You were never surprised (or angered) by the way a method call behaved. Everything acted exactly how you would expect it.

  4. How should I put this? by jcr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, because C++ is a Turing-complete programming language, you can do anything with C++ that you can with Objective-C.

    However, to anyone who has used Obj-C and NeXTSTEP in any depth, your question sounds much like "What's so great about having sex? I can have an orgasm by jerking off, can't I?"

    Let me put it this way: in 1989, I knew the Mac *cold*. I switched to NeXT, and it took me about one month to be as productive using the AppKit as I had ever been on the Mac. Within the year, I was at least three times as fast doing any given task.

    The only development environment that ever arguably equalled NeXTSTEP for productivity was Smalltalk.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."