Rob, perhaps you missed the word "parallel" in the last paragraph of
my post. :) Apple could do it incrementally, over a period of many
years, precisely in the way that Joel talks about in the article you
mentioned. In fact, considering how much of a niche language Obj-C
already is, Apple will have to do something like that sooner or
later. In, say, 15 years, I'm sure there will be newer languages with
much better features and Obj-C will suffer the same fate which has
befallen languages like Algol, Cobol, Smalltalk, and Pascal (and, one
might argue, also Fortran), namely, there will hardly be anyone
interested in using, learning, or teaching it. So, assuming Apple
engineers don't live forever, who's going to maintain all the Obj-C
code base when no one really cares for Obj-C anymore?
The point is, though, that your arguments (both regarding Java not
yet being a mature language circa 1997 and the perils of re-writing
one's entire code base) only reiterate what I was trying to convey,
namely, that Apple opted to stick with Obj-C for reasons other than
any language features. I keep reading (in this list and,
occasionally, also in the cocoa-dev list) that Apple chose to stick
to Obj-C because of Obj-C's oh-so-great dynamic features. I just
think that that is simply not the main reason, not by a long shot,
even if it's true that Obj-C has oh-so-great dynamic features (which,
as I pointed out in a previous post, may not necessarily be the case).
Wagner
============
How many physicists does it take to change a light bulb?
Eleven. One to do it and ten to co-author the paper.
On Aug 23, 2006, at 3:32 PM, Rob Ross wrote:
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.
To rewrite an entire operating system framework would compound the
above story by several orders of magnitude.
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