> I think it's the fact that Apple's primary market is desktop users,
Apple's primary market is consumer desktop users. Microsoft's is corporate desktop users. The need for custom hacked solutions is just far less in the Mac world.
One thing to keep in mind is that even if only a small percentage of Windows users take advantage of VBA/VB/Access, you are still talking about huge number of people numerically. At least in my experience the Windows Power User is alive and well inside the corporate walls.
First of all, Dell already bundles RealPlayer, WordPerfect and other software that competes with Microsoft, so tossing Firefox into the mess isn't that big of a step.
Second, while Dell ships RedHat Linux on it's high-end desktops, most of you whiners don't want to pay for a RedHat subscription anyway. Fortunately Dell will sell most of its desktops bare (without Windows), so you are free to install Ugentou or whatever the linux flavor of the month is.
Finally, the key victory in the antitrust settlement was that MS must take this lying down. If there was even a wift of them threating an OEM about bundled "middleware", they would be opening themselves to an new round of lawsuits.
VB/MFC are technologies that sit on top of an OS that dominates the market. On other platforms they have gained very little traction; even workalikes have not really caught on.
Right, but one of the main properties of.NET is that it puts some distance between the applicaiton runtime and the OS. A C# application would be much more portable to OSX/Cocoa than a Win32 app is... if Apple provided a runtime.
Just to underline your point -- AppleScript Studio* appears to be a very "VBish" RAD enviornment. However this tool gets no hype in the Mac community, and even a lot of the Mac defenders in this comment secition don't seem to be aware of it.
I think this is because there's a huge divide in the Mac world between the commercial application programmers (ObjC, C++) and the regular users. For both Windows and Linux there's a huge number of lower-level integration/solution programmers, and thus scripting/interpreted solutions have a lot more popularity and hype surrounding them. Apple just doesn't have that many of the Power User/Hack Coder-type user that would cause A.S.S. to gain momentum.
(* IMO, the AppleScript language is so annoying that I'd rather learn to program ObjC with my toes than play with this thing, but, well, it does exist.)
What you're ignoring is that Jobs runs a company whose future depends somewhat on what programming languages and APIs they support and the control they have over them.
Actually, I intentionally didn't want to 'go there'.
But, fine, Jobs ran a company down from a 10% marketshare down to a 2% share. If you want to discuss what that collapse had to do with continually shifting developer tools directions, go right ahead.
No, it's not contradictory, Apple should and does have top-notch Java support. Just that Java doesn't have much relevance to desktop applications, while.NET is the successor to technologies that currently dominate that market (VB, MFC, etc).
But the reality is that Apple is cutting Java support, and Apple is also the company playing endless catch-up there (Java 5 support was nearly a year behind Windows/Solaris/Linux).
IMO, Safari got to the head of the pack because it was the first Mac browser that wasn't dog slow. And that's mostly the rendering engine. IE/Mac had a lot more GUI features.
OK Geezer, time for the Alzheimer test. You've responded to two of my posts now, and both times you've exhibited severe mental frailness. Either that or your college curriculum has deprived you from basic reading comprehension.
Metrowerks wanted to play it cautious and didn't want to gamble on Apple's transition to OS X, so what else was Apple to do?
Obvious answer: They could have bought out the Mac version of Metrowerks, since at the time nearly 100% of their developers were using it, and then instituted an orderly roadmap to transition devs to ProjectBuilder.
As an old-school programmer (20+ years) (...) coming from straight C, ObjC is much cleaner (...) I'm guessing the set of people who have (done smalltalk) is extremely small nowadays.
Well, not that many developers come from "straight C" anymore either. College curriculums are heavily biased towards Java (and maybe C#), with OO C++ being the professional app language, and plain C is positioned as low-level or embedded language rather than an application language like Jobs is discussing. So, for the non-old-school, it's not clear that being rooted in C is a big plus it was 20 years ago.
What Jobs is ignoring is that Macintosh customers are primarily non-technical, and have no need or want for a "religious war" around programming languages. Even if Obj-C and Cocoa are perfect, they are still for all intents-and-purposes a proprietary Apple-only environment (please don't pretend GNUStep has any wider importance), and is only used by True Believer devs.
What the Mac platform needs the most is applications, good ones. And if the apps are good, the users simply don't care if the language frameworks are slightly faster or nicer to program with.
ObjC/Cocoa is one set of good tools, but so is the.NET framework and C# and it is considerably more popular as well. Withholding.NET (and Java) from Mac users only hurts the variety of applicaitons, which in turn hurts the strength of the platform.
NeXT was a developer tool company and he could get away with this approach. Mac is a mainstream platform (or trying to be), and there needs to be "more than one way to do it".
I'm sure that IM interoperability could have been purchased for a much smaller price. No, the number one reason listed was google buying their way into AOL's advertising channels. Anyway, it seems like a lot of money for a declining market.
Actually, one of Microsoft's classic tricks is tricking their compeititors into investing in white elephants. As seen recently when they bid up the price of AOL before feeding it to Google.
However, Opera might have some value to MS on PocketPC. It has no real value to Google.
I was involved in a couple large ASP projects (one ~40KLOC VBScript, another ~20KLOC Javascript). In both cases the projects were successful, the code was OO and maintainable. In both cases I also recommended that they go with Java or.NET, and I was right - they would have been cheaper/faster/better had they taken my advice.
I will grant that dynamic languages propobally give less skilled programmers more ways to screw something up but that's there problem not mine
Judging by your spelling, I recommend a statically-typed language:)
(As an actual response, what happened to VB was that it became ghetto-ized, and then the salaries dropped through the floor. Then it becames your problem.
And no, I never programmed much VB professionally, I was just around while all this happened)
VB had some horrible language constructs, true, but that's not why it was a bad enviornment -- it was the typing issues that caused most VB projects to fail.
(And I don't think 'powerful' is the term you are looking for -- even VB6 had a servlet-type interface, and it was 'useful' enough for certain things.)
But that gets to the heart of the issue -- Solutions developers learned the hard way with VB that runtime type-checking significantly hurts the "scalability" of a development project, both in size and # of developers. But now that VB has been written off and forgotten, so have the lessons, and a new generation is about to relearn them with new and cool languages.
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> I think it's the fact that Apple's primary market is desktop users,
Apple's primary market is consumer desktop users. Microsoft's is corporate desktop users. The need for custom hacked solutions is just far less in the Mac world.
One thing to keep in mind is that even if only a small percentage of Windows users take advantage of VBA/VB/Access, you are still talking about huge number of people numerically. At least in my experience the Windows Power User is alive and well inside the corporate walls.
Where is the option to buy a Dell box with a blank drive or some linux distro
Dell n-series
Your entire post needs a reality check.
First of all, Dell already bundles RealPlayer, WordPerfect and other software that competes with Microsoft, so tossing Firefox into the mess isn't that big of a step.
Second, while Dell ships RedHat Linux on it's high-end desktops, most of you whiners don't want to pay for a RedHat subscription anyway. Fortunately Dell will sell most of its desktops bare (without Windows), so you are free to install Ugentou or whatever the linux flavor of the month is.
Finally, the key victory in the antitrust settlement was that MS must take this lying down. If there was even a wift of them threating an OEM about bundled "middleware", they would be opening themselves to an new round of lawsuits.
VB/MFC are technologies that sit on top of an OS that dominates the market. On other platforms they have gained very little traction; even workalikes have not really caught on.
.NET is that it puts some distance between the applicaiton runtime and the OS. A C# application would be much more portable to OSX/Cocoa than a Win32 app is ... if Apple provided a runtime.
Right, but one of the main properties of
Just to underline your point -- AppleScript Studio* appears to be a very "VBish" RAD enviornment. However this tool gets no hype in the Mac community, and even a lot of the Mac defenders in this comment secition don't seem to be aware of it.
I think this is because there's a huge divide in the Mac world between the commercial application programmers (ObjC, C++) and the regular users. For both Windows and Linux there's a huge number of lower-level integration/solution programmers, and thus scripting/interpreted solutions have a lot more popularity and hype surrounding them. Apple just doesn't have that many of the Power User/Hack Coder-type user that would cause A.S.S. to gain momentum.
(* IMO, the AppleScript language is so annoying that I'd rather learn to program ObjC with my toes than play with this thing, but, well, it does exist.)
No reply, except that I played a ton of Wolf ET, so thanks for ETPro and all the other things which kept it fun.
What you're ignoring is that Jobs runs a company whose future depends somewhat on what programming languages and APIs they support and the control they have over them.
Actually, I intentionally didn't want to 'go there'.
But, fine, Jobs ran a company down from a 10% marketshare down to a 2% share. If you want to discuss what that collapse had to do with continually shifting developer tools directions, go right ahead.
No, it's not contradictory, Apple should and does have top-notch Java support. Just that Java doesn't have much relevance to desktop applications, while .NET is the successor to technologies that currently dominate that market (VB, MFC, etc).
But the reality is that Apple is cutting Java support, and Apple is also the company playing endless catch-up there (Java 5 support was nearly a year behind Windows/Solaris/Linux).
IMO, Safari got to the head of the pack because it was the first Mac browser that wasn't dog slow. And that's mostly the rendering engine. IE/Mac had a lot more GUI features.
Yeah, why would a platform company want to make life easier for their ISVs? Gee, that's a tough one -- try mulling it over for a while.
(BTW, CodeWarrior is a native OSX app, and like most classic Mac apps, it didn't need to be "re-architected from the ground up" to get there.)
Really, there are so few professional Cocoa developers that it is ridiclous to make any generalizations about them.
OK Geezer, time for the Alzheimer test. You've responded to two of my posts now, and both times you've exhibited severe mental frailness. Either that or your college curriculum has deprived you from basic reading comprehension.
Metrowerks wanted to play it cautious and didn't want to gamble on Apple's transition to OS X, so what else was Apple to do?
Obvious answer: They could have bought out the Mac version of Metrowerks, since at the time nearly 100% of their developers were using it, and then instituted an orderly roadmap to transition devs to ProjectBuilder.
First of all, I'm responding to his position, not visa-versa. Second, you completely failed to understand my point.
As an old-school programmer (20+ years) (...) coming from straight C, ObjC is much cleaner (...) I'm guessing the set of people who have (done smalltalk) is extremely small nowadays.
Well, not that many developers come from "straight C" anymore either. College curriculums are heavily biased towards Java (and maybe C#), with OO C++ being the professional app language, and plain C is positioned as low-level or embedded language rather than an application language like Jobs is discussing. So, for the non-old-school, it's not clear that being rooted in C is a big plus it was 20 years ago.
What Jobs is ignoring is that Macintosh customers are primarily non-technical, and have no need or want for a "religious war" around programming languages. Even if Obj-C and Cocoa are perfect, they are still for all intents-and-purposes a proprietary Apple-only environment (please don't pretend GNUStep has any wider importance), and is only used by True Believer devs.
.NET framework and C# and it is considerably more popular as well. Withholding .NET (and Java) from Mac users only hurts the variety of applicaitons, which in turn hurts the strength of the platform.
What the Mac platform needs the most is applications, good ones. And if the apps are good, the users simply don't care if the language frameworks are slightly faster or nicer to program with.
ObjC/Cocoa is one set of good tools, but so is the
NeXT was a developer tool company and he could get away with this approach. Mac is a mainstream platform (or trying to be), and there needs to be "more than one way to do it".
When all the Python hype is about how cheap/easy/fast it is to develop with, what conclusion do you think the PHBs will come to?
Which is great until you get to be on a project big enough to have multiple developers
I'm sure that IM interoperability could have been purchased for a much smaller price. No, the number one reason listed was google buying their way into AOL's advertising channels. Anyway, it seems like a lot of money for a declining market.
Actually, one of Microsoft's classic tricks is tricking their compeititors into investing in white elephants. As seen recently when they bid up the price of AOL before feeding it to Google.
However, Opera might have some value to MS on PocketPC. It has no real value to Google.
"It can be done" isn't much of an argument.
.NET, and I was right - they would have been cheaper/faster/better had they taken my advice.
I was involved in a couple large ASP projects (one ~40KLOC VBScript, another ~20KLOC Javascript). In both cases the projects were successful, the code was OO and maintainable. In both cases I also recommended that they go with Java or
I will grant that dynamic languages propobally give less skilled programmers more ways to screw something up but that's there problem not mine
:)
Judging by your spelling, I recommend a statically-typed language
(As an actual response, what happened to VB was that it became ghetto-ized, and then the salaries dropped through the floor. Then it becames your problem.
And no, I never programmed much VB professionally, I was just around while all this happened)
ASP does have some sort of intermediate bytecode it stores in memory. I agree that it's nothing like the JVM though.
And we were talking about "first", not "better" -- no doubt that JSP is better.
VB had some horrible language constructs, true, but that's not why it was a bad enviornment -- it was the typing issues that caused most VB projects to fail.
(And I don't think 'powerful' is the term you are looking for -- even VB6 had a servlet-type interface, and it was 'useful' enough for certain things.)
Well, in that case VB is "typesafe" too.
But that gets to the heart of the issue -- Solutions developers learned the hard way with VB that runtime type-checking significantly hurts the "scalability" of a development project, both in size and # of developers. But now that VB has been written off and forgotten, so have the lessons, and a new generation is about to relearn them with new and cool languages.