Carbon was intended as a transitional API from OS 9 to OS X and
it worked well for that purpose. Carbon's been around since
the advent of OS X so how long do you keep a transitional API alive?
I think it, in the form of HIToolbox, moved well beyond that
remit years ago; a transitional API was something like QuickDraw
(mostly works, but CG is more capable).
New features like Carbon Events or HIViews went well beyond what
was needed to transition Mac OS 9 apps to Mac OS X - a lot of
these was added in 10.2 or later.
The problem here is that the replacement API (Cocoa) is nothing like
carbon and as Larry has said, it's much more than just an API.
It's also a lot less than "just an API": Cocoa gives you
relatively high-level building blocks, and no real way to modify
their behaviour (aside from approaches like delegates, which are
much more ad-hoc and a lot less flexible than Carbon Events).
Cocoa is also missing a lot of useful functionality that's found
in Carbon (e.g., everything in HITheme.h, a less capable view
model, less capable menu APIs, etc).
The cynic in me says that bits of Carbon like HITheme will
probably just be made private, wrapped in an Obj-C API, and
presented as the next big thing in 10.6...
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