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.

Comments

Tucows

[perlyking]

The most interesting thing about the article for me is that Tucows let you buy a higher rating!

Can't get too excited about this..

[Otter]

He's an old Be guy who doesn't like OS X. Mac users found his app buggy and saw no reason to switch from the beloved BBEdit. (He agrees that no one took much interest in it.) And Linux users, who won't pay for anything, certainly wouldn't pay for a new text editor.

Like someone else said, the most interesting factoid was that you can buy rating stars on Tucows. Also, I had to laugh at:

I had hoped that with the new popularity of Linux and FreeBSD there might be more and more users coming from Mac OS or Windows who would like to use a more comfortable editor.

But I was wrong. I sold three copies and one of those three was a fraud. I did have thousands of downloads though.

I think this guy is crying out to be a Qt developer....

Re:Leaving OS X Because of Cocoa

[bnenning]

What makes ObjC a better language?

Primarily, a dynamic runtime. Want to know if an object implements a method? Ask it with -respondsToSelector:. Want to get a class object given its name? NSClassFromString(). Want to set a property of an object, when both the property name and value are determined at runtime? Use -takeValue:forKey:. C++ has none of these capabilities (at least last time I checked), and they are very useful in a variety of areas.

Almost all Software Engineers agree that most of the software development process can/should be automated.

Which is another argument for Objective-C, since programs using it tend to be much shorter than C++ programs. The line you don't have to write doesn't have a bug.

C++ is going to allow engineers to develop software that doesn't depend on run time conditions, but more on compile time conditions.

And you can write static code in ObjC if you want to. But in C++ as soon as you want dynamic behavior, you end up writing tons of code (and therefore bugs) to reproduce the features that more dynamic languages give you for free.