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Re: Converting nibs (Re: [ANN] Nano 1.4)


On Jun 20, 2007, at 10:49 AM, Dale Jensen wrote:

Welcome to the world of the Pascal developer, whom there was a fair bit of trivializing of on this list, what, two weeks ago?  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.  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.)

The Pascal to C/C++ transition, painful as it might have been, was a good thing. It brought Apple into line with the direction the industry as a whole was headed. Pascal was being used less and less by everyone else and C/C++ more and more. Now we have the opposite transition. We're going from a language still being heavily used by a lot of people to an obscure one used almost exclusively for Apple development. I guess you could argue that you only have to use it to touch the system APIs, but that still seems like quite a bit.

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.

C/C++ is not becoming obsolete by any stretch of the imagination...at least nowhere but for Carbon developers being forced down another road.

Ken

-- 
Ken Worley
Software Engineer, Tiberius, Inc.


 

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References: 
 >Re: [ANN] Nano 1.4 (From: "Jan Barnholt" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: [ANN] Nano 1.4 (From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>)
 >Re: [ANN] Nano 1.4 (From: Bryan Prusha <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Converting nibs (Re: [ANN] Nano 1.4) (From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Converting nibs (Re: [ANN] Nano 1.4) (From: Dale Jensen <email@hidden>)



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