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Pepper Author Calls It Quits
gruber writes "Maarten Hekkelman, author of the cross-platform text editor Pepper, has thrown in the towel. He announced last week that he's discontinuing Pepper. He agreed to an interview with me, on topics ranging from the state of Mac OS X to the difficulties of cross-platform development." It's quite an interesting read, even if he does currently prefer Windows XP over Mac OS X and Linux.
Maarten Hekkelman doesn't like Mac OS X. He also doesn't seem to me to know much about it, nor does he seem to want to know much about it. He disliked the operating system offered on the platform on which it had developed a following, that is the simple reason why Pepper is no longer a viable option.
;-)
To justify my statements, amongst other thing, he says:
Mac OS X, however, loses on all fronts. It claims to be a Unix but it doesn't support much of the more advanced Unix features, since it is using such an old kernel.
For someone who is writing a text editor to blame the limitations of the kernel of the operating system on which it runs for lack of functionality is simply looking for excuses and is, in reality, a case of barking up the wrong tree (though he does mention a reference to a very old misfeature with regard 'piping', though there are/were very easy other ways to do the very same thing).
Though not exclusively based on FreeBSD 4.4, MacOS X 10.2 is based very heavily around a FreeBSD 4.4 core and, of course, GCC 3.1. Neither of these are 'old' by any practical definition.
Though the kernel has a certain level of maturity, the Mach layer currently acts primarily only as an abstraction layer for developers and has been very heavily hacked at since it's use in NeXT. The kernel is not 'old' nor 'krufty', despite the distinct impression given.
Maarten Hekkelman also says:
Did you ever consider dropping support for the old Mac OS, and making Pepper only for Mac OS X?
No.
I can understand not wanting to be locked in to Coca, but refusing to drop OS 9 (at the very least apart from bug fixes) was a mistake. More effort should have been spent on the Mac OS X (and Windows) versions.
Part of being a good developer is being able to make smart decisions. To keep supporting an out-dated operating system when it is clear that are other badly needed new features that need to be addressed (features needed to keep the product viable) is foolish.
Though I don't know him, the fact that he has now left development and gone to 'Database Administrator' speaks volumes to me about his ability to strategically plan product development, and his proficiency as a developer. I don't like to be critical of someone I haven't met, but that is the distinct impression I get.
I fail to see why a truly good developer would want to do this, as database administration is tedious at best and mind numbing at worse (and 1.5 TB systems are really not that interesting quite frankly, a Network Appliance Filer installation will do the job for you and is easily maintained part time by any administrator, with multiple redundant disks, multiple network connections, multiple power supplies, multiple controllers, the ability to roll back to previous versions (snapshots) and the ability to use Snap Mirror to keep a up-to-date version running off site which you can simply switch over to if the system goes FUBAR - makes it a no-brainer of a solution). I should point out, in the interest of fairness that they are not the only ones that make such a product (there are many cheaper competitors more suitable for smaller scale installations), but theirs is the best IME
Another thing I find telling is that he seems to dislike and find it hard to adjust to many things in Mac OS X and to dislike them quite passionately. I personally dislike little in most operating systems, other than crashes. IMO true hackers (as-in-the-coder-sence-of-the-word) never find it difficult to adjust and I have always believed this ability it to be innate in good hackers.
For example, I have never sat in front of something like Project Builder and bemoaned it's single window behavior (as Maarten Hekkelman does in this interview), I found it quite intuitive. I found it equally intuitive to have multiple windows, I've never had a problem with either. I also have no major problems with the Dock or with the Windows taskbar.
Of course I expect *users* to get confused over this sort of thing, but not developers!
No surprise there. He's an old Be bigot, and Apple's decision to buy NeXT instead of Be is probably the #1 reason why his favorite operating system is dead and gone. Nobody hates OS X with greater blind passion than a hard-core Be fan.
Whatever Avi Tevanian and/or Steve Jobs does over the next 10 years, for any company, I guarantee that this guy will hate it.
If you asked an Amiga or Atari user what he thought about Macintosh System 7 back in 1987 or so, the shrill of his whines would have been at about the same pitch.
Oddly enough, when an unpopular OS dies, the former users never seem to blame the most popular OS for killing it (Windows), but instead lay the corpse at the feet of the #2 player (Apple). Probably because these also-ran companies (Commodore, Atari, Be), having failed to get traction with general users, tried to shoulder their way into niche markets that Apple is known for (media, music production, publishing, etc.) and rapidly went out of business in the attempt. Just a theory, anyway.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I'm a Be biggot.
I also just spent several thousand dollars buying into Apple a few months ago. I love Mac OS X.
I used Pe, and it was good. Marteen, is a good programmer. He fucked up and wrote it for carbon. Big mistake.
We have clearly entered the realm of "opinion" here. I'm definitely "pro user" (I've developed software on OS X at work, and use a Mac to make original music at home), yet I find Aqua a great GUI to work with.
My opinion: WinXP is not ready for prime-time on a semi-pro music production system. Mac OS X is the right GUI that gets out of my way to let me do what I need to do. YMMV.
-- clvrmnky
Y'know, this discussion thus far has pissed me off. Every time a software author decides to give up on a project people rip him down - usually without checking out the project. I respect Hekkelman for the amount of work that he put into Pe / Pepper - Enough so that Neal Stephenson used Pe to write his book "In the Beginning there was the Command Line" Not many shareware authors can say a book was written on their program.