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[OT] More Carbon/Cocoa realities

After some more research and contemplation, I have a few more thoughts to offer regarding NeXT's decision to limit Carbon to 64- bit. They go something like this:

There's been a good bit of discussion about Cocoa and Obj-C recently, and how once you get over your aversion to Obj-C's weird bracketed syntax that it's about an afternoon to pick up Obj-C. This is consistent with what I've heard for years. What hasn't been discussed much in the recent threads is that Cocoa, a complete application framework, can*not* be learned in an afternoon or any other short period of time. Cocoa takes time to learn. Writing first-quality applications with it takes even longer. Why? Because like every other application framework, if you want the behavior Cocoa provides, it's trivial. But as soon as you want to customize it -- and virtually all serious applications can benefit from some level of that -- you need to roll up your sleeves, get to know the framework at a whole new level, and get your hands dirty overriding its standard behavior. This is why there are so many bad Cocoa applications out there, written by people who whipped up a GUI for their application without taking the time to polish it. Well, okay, it's more than that. A lot of people started developing for the Mac since Mac OS X came out are unfamiliar with Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. Unfortunately, that even includes some of the engineers at Apple. Point is, if you want to produce good, commercial-quality applications with Cocoa, it's not just a day to learn Obj-C and another to learn Cocoa.

It seems there are more Carbon developers out there than many people realize. The ratio of Cocoa:Carbon developers at WWDC is skewed toward Cocoa developers by the fact that a high percentage of WWDC attendees are new to the Mac and using WWDC to get up to speed, and Mac newbies generally use Cocoa. So that ratio is not a representative cross-section. Most major applications that Apple considers important for getting people to consider using a Mac are Carbon. All of Microsoft's products, all of Adobe's, Quicken, QuarkXPress, tax preparation applications, Final Cut Pro, Mathematica, and so on. Furthermore, almost all of the critical applications are cross-platform, and as discussed here, Carbon is the preferred choice of people doing cross-platform development, and even beyond the critical applications there are a lot of cross-platform applications.

The point of all this is that I think Apple may have a tough time convincing their Carbon developers to en masse take six months to a year off of real development to switch everything over to Cocoa. This is exacerbated by the fact that it's almost inevitable some of those developers are doing stuff in Carbon they can't do in Cocoa, so they'd have to wait until Apple can enhance Cocoa to preserve those features, adding further delays.

So, what happens when Apple finally starts using an Intel chip with no 32-bit mode, as Sean McBride suggested? As I understand it, Intel has a mobile chip schedule for release in 2008 that doesn't have a 32- bit mode. No Carbon applications. No Rosetta. No joy in Macville.

Larry


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