From NeXTSTEP to Cocoa: Erik Buck on the Development of Cocoa and Objective-C | Hacker News Reader

From NeXTSTEP to Cocoa: Erik Buck on the Development of Cocoa and Objective-C

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Funny this is posted, I just bought a copy of Cocoa Design Patterns yesterday. Hopefully it's still useful for modern iOS development.

Lol, swift.

Patterns are patterns, regardless of what language that uses them. Cocoa SDK shouldn't have changed much between Obj-C and Swift.

David Chisnall is a master too, and a pity that GNUStep and etoileos.com didn't spread more. NEXTStep could have been Mono, long ago.

I had the pleasure of taking two iOS courses led by Erik Buck at Wright State University ~2012. His background and knowledge of Cocoa and everything underlying the iOS SDK was so insightful. If you don't happen to be here in Ohio, then I highly recommend taking a look at his book.

Weird submission on two levels. I know and have worked with Erik Buck, but the article is seven years old. Not sure why it would be posted now.

really needs a [2009] added to the title.

Sometimes older articles that are interesting are submitted. Granted, that may not seem like "News", but can be of interest to the community. As sibling noted, the title should include an indication of its vintage in these cases.

What was the second level?

That it's an article about a guy I know and have worked with :) (Cue "It's a Small World"...)

Ah! Gotcha. All a matter of perspective :)

> I expect the forthcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard to set a new high standard for performance on multi-core computers.

Well, that serves as a reminder of (a) the high water mark and (b) the date of the article. :)

"I ported a lot of assembly language software originally written for the Atari ST computer"

[2009]

I was looking forward to reading this interview, but I lost interest after he made this dubious claim: "For $7500 with a student discount, I got a much more capable NeXT system at a fraction of the price of a Mac II...".

A /color/ Mac II went for upwards of $10k at launch, and it would be hard to argue that the NeXT system wasn't significantly more capable. It's a Unix machine vs a cooperatively multitasking box whose OS you could crash with a bug in your user-space code. That's not a fun environment to be learning C in, as a student. Trust me.

Perhaps, but the entry-level Mac II with a 20 MB drive and monitor cost about $5500. Which system was more capable is open to debate, but that wasn't my concern. I was hoping for an objective presentation of facts and observations about the evolution of what we now call the Cocoa framework, but the interview started off with a statement about the NeXT system that wasn't quite true.

And curiously enough, that's exactly where the interview went, which you would've known had you not been offput by someone's slightly flawed recollection of computers from 20 years ago.

>but the interview started off with a statement about the NeXT system that wasn't quite true

People don't remember any odd detail 20+ years on. But he probably remembered $7500 NeXT being much more value for money than the $5500 Mac II, and his mind translated it as "was a fraction of the price", even if it wasn't.

I guess I was being a little harsh. Forgive me, I've been cranky ever since the election.

Why specify color? The $7500 NeXT cube didn't have it.

I didn't let that oddity dissuade me from reading the rest of the article, but it really doesn't match the way I remember things working back then. I sure didn't know anybody who had $7500 to spend on a computer; I always understood the exorbitant price to be the primary reason the platform never took off.

> I sure didn't know anybody who had $7500 to spend on a computer;

Let alone a student! If only I had that kind of cash as a student...

/me gazes wistfully to the stars gracing the horizon

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