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Comment by mattl | Hacker News Reader

Steve Hayman, long time NeXT/Apple employee who just retired last week from Apple having started in 1993 with NeXT.

His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWnDJtUyrw

Oh my god what a gem: “it’s got a steep learning curve which is good because that means you learn a lot in a short period of time” hahaha

Absolutely stealing this

The idea of any official Apple presentation today beginning with a humorous rendition of _God Save the Queen_ is so absurd I can't help but smile at what we've lost.

In many ways, WebObjects feels ahead of its time.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.

AFAIK, WebObjects is still in use inside Apple, but also Project Wonder and WOLips have kept the tooling active (it all stopped working after Apple depreciated the Obj-C/Java bridge) and modern libraries for WebObjects.

It was probably no better than most of the other frameworks we have. Most things aren't. In a set of lots of things, it's more fun to speculate about the ones that we haven't seen, but there's a good chance they're about the same as the ones we have.

Steve is easily the most entertaining conference speaker I’ve had the pleasure to attend in person. He was a regular at MacSysAdmin for many years, and always in the Friday afternoon slot when you need a jolt of energy. Good times.

What a great video :). Interesting how some old ideas are new again. Thank you for sharing this and congrats to Steve Hayman for his tenure at Apple!

"It's got a steep learning curve but that's ok, because it means you learn a lot in a short period of time."

Watched only a short time, but the phone call were he pretends to be a lifeline for "who wants to be a millionaire" cracked me up.

At one point he asks someone in the front row if EOF is patented, and then blurts out "software patents are evil" amongst other things.

Really refreshing to see.

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