On Jun 20, 2007, at 9:50 AM, Laurence Harris wrote:
I'm sure the current IB was not responsible (there is no "I" in
team -- especially when there's no one on the team ;), but let's
just say the experience left some deep scars.
There's no "I", but there's a "Me" if you jumble up the letters :-)
Anywhere else Apple can better help you through this transition?
Sure. I need the e-mail address of someone who will convert my
Carbon nibs to Cocoa nibs and rewrite all the code that needs to
be rewritten but won't result in anything any user will be able to
detect.
Welcome to the world of the Pascal developer, whom there was a fair
bit of trivializing of on this list, what, two weeks ago?
I don't think anyone trivialized it. In my case I just expressed my
feeling that using Pascal is more hassle with no significant benefit
unless you have a big project that's already in Pascal.
Pascal was the language that Apple wanted you to use, back in 1984,
but it was transitioned out in favour of C/C++ a decade later.
Some chose to convert, spending a lot more time than you face, with
mixed success.
Actually, no. I did that conversion, from Pascal to C++. I wrote a
HyperCard script that did almost all of the syntactical conversion
and then I cleaned up the rest manually. My recollection is that it
was less painful than porting my classic Mac OS 9 application over to
Carbon for Mac OS X, and that doesn't even the later conversion to
nibs. The language conversion was pretty straightforward. Moving to
Carbon involved redesigning code and working around gobs of bugs in
the OS. In Apple's defense regarding the move from Pascal, though,
the choice to switch to C was dictated more or less by the industry,
as that was the most common language in use at the time (and it still
is). The move to Obj-C is different in that regard. Also, switching
to Cocoa combines both a change in language *and* application design.
Others (including myself,) chose to stick with the legacy code,
again, with mixed success. I still maintain several legacy
projects in Pascal, but anything new is written in C++ or (in the
last couple of years,) Objective C (I'm not the world's most
observant person, but the "Use Cocoa" writing's been on the wall
for quite some time.)
You have the same option -- maintain your current code, with the
realization that eventually you'll face obsolescence, or start
over, with the realization that you'll be spending tons of time,
money and effort on something that will not likely impress any of
your users, at least until you can leverage the new stuff you'll
have access to.
If Apple (or a third party, like the FPC/GPC guys have for Pascal,)
provides you some tools to make that happen, all the better, but
the road before you has been trod by many people, on many
platforms. It sucks, but language obsolescence is just one of
those facts of life of this industry.
a) C/C++ is not considered obsolete in most circles. b) I think Apple
could do more to easy the pain of such transitions.
Larry
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