But it's not 1987. It's 20 years later. Given the lack of legacy
code in Objective C and the few programmers who know it, wouldn't
it have made sense for Apple to choose a more modern language for
their platform? One that had learned from the mistakes of C, C++,
and Objective C?
If Apple had chosen to go with C++, then I would have understood
their reasoning. They were choosing familiarity over perfection.
However since they chose a language almost everyone was going to
have to learn for the first time anyway, they could have made a
much better choice than Objective C.
Cocoa is really an outgrowth of NeXTStep (and that's why many of the
Cocoa classes start with NS).
Recall that Apple bought Jobs' NeXTStep company in Feb 1997 and that
Jobs became Apple's interim CEO only a few months later, at a time
when Apple was not doing so well due to Amelio's abysmal performance
as CEO (Apple had missed beating Windows 95 to the market, and
Copland was a big failure).
Thus, Apple had already invested quite some money into NS when it was
in a dire financial situation and, so, from a purely financial
standpoint, it makes sense that Apple would choose to stick to Obj-C
rather than spend time and money re-writing all their NS code in a
new language.
That, I believe, is the ultimate reason why they did so, not how
great Obj-C's runtime model is (which is what I keep hearing, despite
the fact that (I believe) all of Cocoa could very well be written in
Java or some other similarly modern language).
I think Apple is now doing sufficiently well financially that they
could afford to start a parallel project to re-write all of Cocoa
using a more modern language, perhaps Java or perhaps a language of
their own design (incorporating the best of all previous efforts). I
think it would ensure a larger developer base and, in the long run,
benefit the company.
I can't be totally wrong about that since Apple has announced Obj-C
2.0...
Wagner
============
The difference between an auto mechanic and a quantum mechanic is
that the quantum mechanic can get the car inside the garage without
opening the door.
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