I am still in awe of NeXT's software technology, generally. It was just so carefully and intentionally designed as a coherent whole; one would hope this was where we were going as we got better at architecting software (as individuals, as a field), but disappointingly in retrospect it appears as a kind of high-point, after which we continued to descend into ball-and-twine mediocrity. For Reasons economic and and social that I think people could argue about a lot, but we don't because in part because as a field we don't seem to even agree on what excellence in software architecture/design even means anymore.

But what I want to talk about instead is:

> Like EOF, our database layer that still puts Ruby-on-Rails to shame.

I spent a couple years programming with EOF (the "Enteprise Object Framework", an ORM), and many more recent years programming with ActiveRecord. EOF had a few features that ActiveRecord still doesn't that I miss (like properly functioning multi-table inheritance; and lazy "eager loading" triggered on first access for all associations; Rails 6.1 has a welcome feature to RAISE on n+1 behavior, but why not just lazily trigger the efficient load instead, which is probably no harder to implement? Maybe nobody thought of it, having not used EOF?).

But I wouldn't actually say it still puts ActiveRecord "to shame". ActiveRecord is very similar to EOF in design, by 2020 nearly as mature, with 80-90% of the features.

Yeah, it's striking that ~20 years later we can say AR is mostly as good as EOF haha (and doesn't have anything of note that EOF didn't already have, it hasnt' superceded it in any ways). It's internal architecture isn't quite as elegant. But it really is nearly as good as EOF, it's deficiencies compared to EOF aren't large enough to be particularly shameful, in my experience/opinion, it's in the ballpark!

AR is so similar to EOF that I have always wondered if some of it's designers had experience with EOF.