Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Actually NS is short for "NeXT & Sun". The prefix was adopted for OpenStep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

The pre-OpenStep version of the APIs used a NX prefix. You can still see some lingering NX* classes/functions in macOS stack traces.

View on HN

I was leading the AppKit group at NeXT at the time, and "NS" definitely came before the Sun relationship, referring to NextStep (or NeXTSTEP, the spelling changed every release). I distinctly remember our team expecting we'd have to suck it up and change the prefix to something more neutral when the Sun deal was made, and then being surprised that they didn't seem to care when the spec was discussed. Maybe the alternate interpretation of "NeXT and Sun" satisfied them, but I don't remember that expression ever being commonly used, and it was not the original basis for NS.

Thank you, that settles it then. I've heard the "NeXT & Sun" story from several sources for at least 15 years -- I had no idea it's apocryphal.

I can’t find a source for NS meaning NeXT and Sun either in the article you linked or elsewhere (sorry if I missed it). I get there was a name change associated with OPENSTEP, where the prefix changed from NX- to NS- and makes some sense because otherwise wouldn’t the prefix change for OPENSTEP have been something like OS- or OP-? I’m just wondering about the source for this. It would be interesting to hear from someone privy to reasoning behind choice of prefix.

This Wikipedia article [0] mentions both, but doesn't conclude. Would be interesting to hear from someone who was actually there to settle it; I haven't been convinced of a consensus either way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_(API)#History

I learned to program NeXTSTEP on NeXTSTEP 3.x at NeXT’s weeklong developer training camp. The API had NS prefixes, both in the files and the developer books. The first OpenStep release was 4.0.

Yeah, I pretty sure that the NX -> NS transition was before OPENSTEP (NeXT & Sun) and corresponded with retain-release. I too started with 3.x and it was NS then.

Yeah, I've also heard that NS stands for "NeXT Software, Inc" vs "NeXT, Inc"

I believe the NS prefix dated from NeXTSTEP 3.0 (1992), well before Sun was ever involved with NeXT.

So far as I know, NS stands for NextStep.

Huh, interesting. I came across NXHashMap in the Objective-C runtime documentation and was wondering what the "NX" stood for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com