Objc, in my experience is a great language, particularly for building GUIs and I concur was a big part of Apple's success with OSX and later iPhone and iPad. With the core foundation classes (and other frameworks) Apple inherited from NeXT an excellent bedrock to build on.
If you think that for a long period of time all apps were built in Objc for Mac & ios, and how quickly they managed to make an ecosystem of developers who were building applications for Apple systems - I'm pretty sure if they had a c++ framework that wouldn't have happened so easily.
As an illustration, there's a video of SJ building a quick GUI app to demonstrate RemoteObjects (in response to MS's Distributed OLE) where he quickly knocks up a slider and text box.
There's also another video where a NeXT developer goes head to head with a Sun dev in a race to finish a simple gui app (you'll never guess who wins).
Why did SJ and NeXT go all in for RAD tooling and making it easy to build apps on their platform? Because of feedback from his days at Apple when developers complained it was too hard and slow using the MacOs toolbox APIs.
FWIW I also believe that a large part of Microsoft's success was due to Visual Basic, also a hugely successful RAD tool that brought thousands of new developers to its platform.
I'm still using my 2014 16" MacBook Pro too - the SSD has made such a dramatic difference to the performance of machines that I think in general they age much better than previously.
I'm not a heavy user but that machine can easily handle xcode Objc/c++ programming quite handily.
>like we're still living in the 90s when you could realistically master the whole chain of tools and ideas as an individual.
Well, I personally quite near the beginning of my career had the exact same problem as the OP in the 90s. I started off learning the MacOSX API and C, then C++. Then started looking at Windows API - DirectX and COM were also new then (Win 95) and MFC was just getting started as a direct response to OWL and the Borland tools and VB 3.0 was starting to make big inroads into RAD dev. Then the straw that nearly broke my back was Delphi, which I have never used but was wildly popular and a 'must learn'. By the time Java came out I had decided to stick to the WIN32 API and COM and ignore the rest so I had a career focus but a lot happened in the 90's and it was easy to be totally befuddled as to where to focus your energies.
I think you mean what's now called classic MacOS. System 7, Mac OS 8/9
>Programming is hard, let's go shopping.
What you are describing is not programing, but life and career choices, which is much, much harder in my opinion and most of us are sorely unprepared for.
Yes, you're right, System 7. I had a Performa 275 with a 68030 CPU and learned to program C & C++ with Metrowerks (a fantastic IDE for the time). I don't have that anymore but might still have a copy of Inside Macintosh somewhere.
>What you are describing is not programming, but life and career choices, which is much,
>much harder in my opinion and most of us are sorely unprepared for.
This is true, you can either simply bob along on the currents of fate and take whatever comes to you, or try and take control. At first I was just happy with a job, and luckily (all my working life actually) there's been plenty of opportunities for my skills; but later chose more carefully. I'm sure that's the experience of plenty others too.
From the picture it looked more like a walking gun platform.
Saying that, if I was a downed airman in hostile territory or in the middle of an inhospitable desert I wouldn't mind having one of these little guys along with me.
> if I was a downed airman in hostile territory or in the middle of an inhospitable desert I wouldn't mind having one of these little guys along with me.
Of course, the guys sent to hunt you won't mind having their own to increase their search coverage and firepower.
Very very sad to see these birds disappearing, and lapwings too. The last time I visited my sister in Ballater I heard not a single one.
I'm guessing pesticides kill the insects which then starve the birds for food.
I'm sure if we change our ways in enough time they'll bounce back, but for that to happen enough people would have to mourn their loss and demand change. Instead we stand by powerless and shake our heads.
I'm surprised people are applauding this. The net result of this support (and cockroach's) is that it will take mindshare away from Postgres which has worked hard for decades to build a loyal fanbase.
It's also step 1 of the e.e.e playbook, not that I'm suggesting Google want to extinguish Postgres, but it's clearly aimed at building their market share at the expense of Postgres's.
>sometimes everyone else gets paralyzed with indecision and can’t even get started.
I once worked on a project where exactly that happened, and I view it as one of my biggest failures of my career. I often wonder why I didn't just sit down one day and type int main( ...
and just get on with it.
In the end the project got canned and both contractors terminated early, so I made sure that never happened again.
If nobody had previously succeeded then I would take the point that Carmack was somehow unique, but by the time Doom came out lots of programmers had produced 3d games, and we had ray-tracing and lots of graphics theory and implementation (e.g. elite written in 6502 assembly on an 8 bit cpu).
>You think John Carmack was the only one trying to make 3d games when Doom came out? Thousands of programmers where trying to.
Yes Doom was a great game, and well programmed, but it didn't really move the state of the art forward massively, as I would argue that hundreds of programmers had already written and published 3d games by that point.
If you think that for a long period of time all apps were built in Objc for Mac & ios, and how quickly they managed to make an ecosystem of developers who were building applications for Apple systems - I'm pretty sure if they had a c++ framework that wouldn't have happened so easily.
As an illustration, there's a video of SJ building a quick GUI app to demonstrate RemoteObjects (in response to MS's Distributed OLE) where he quickly knocks up a slider and text box. There's also another video where a NeXT developer goes head to head with a Sun dev in a race to finish a simple gui app (you'll never guess who wins).
Why did SJ and NeXT go all in for RAD tooling and making it easy to build apps on their platform? Because of feedback from his days at Apple when developers complained it was too hard and slow using the MacOs toolbox APIs.
FWIW I also believe that a large part of Microsoft's success was due to Visual Basic, also a hugely successful RAD tool that brought thousands of new developers to its platform.