On 7 Jul 2010, at 14:36, John Joyce wrote:
> This thread has gone way off topic.
> Please keep it more about Objective-C and less about opinions about other languages and their implementation rationales.
> Thanks. _______________________________________________
Thanks John. It seems to have come to its own end. However, I'd like to thank others for an interesting, albeit sometimes heated discussion.
Overall, Apple has done a good and tasteful job with Objective-C (certainly in contrast to C++, and in the fact that its base is somewhat flaky and old (meaning design criteria no longer relevant)).
I think also Patrick has got some answers, both in the group and offline (at least from me). But it's amazing how a few innocent and entirely appropriate questions can expose all sorts of warts. Some of his examples made me think because I hadn't thought of doing things that way, because I just read and applied Apple's documentation on properties, etc with many years experience and maybe having my mind warped.
However, we should look at programming languages from the POV of a new comer. Yes, I do teach students (I seem to have reached that point in my career), so I'm trying to find the reasoning behind things all the time. Many questions – because they find things difficult – make me think about why they are difficult and do they need to be.
Apple has founded a whole company on this thinking, questioning what is there and asking questions about how things could be better. A key focus must be on newcomers and that has brought about computers for "the rest of us" – not just for us professionals who already have our minds warped by something designed wrong.
That's why I found Burroughs so refreshing in contrast to the obscurity of CDC and what I knew of IBM and subsequently learned. I'm glad to see the "think different" of Bob Barton continued on and magnified in Alan Kay and subsequently in Apple. So a move to Apple from Burroughs was entirely natural for me – especially, since as John found out, Unisys has very much dropped the ball, although IBM was a very efficient competition killing machine (see Richard DeLamarter's Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power). That does not mean that their stuff is not worth studying – in fact, I'd say, it's almost essential.
I just hope to bring some of my enthusiasm for this to the Apple world and make sure that this original thinking is not lost, because it is in danger of being so. The Microsoft world lacks this thinking (although quite a few shafted Burroughs people now work for MS in large-scale transaction-oriented processing).
Anyway – no matter whether we agreed or disagreed – many thanks and kind regards to all,
Ian _______________________________________________
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