On 23 Oct 2010, at 01:07, Joel M. Benisch wrote: MacApp is still in use by some, and it goes back to Object Pascal days (late 1980s?).
Wow, still around.
C and C++ have been around for how long?
And they are the horrors of all horrors. Strange how the worst technologies have the longest lives. But maybe that's because they are 'systems' technologies, whereas applications technologies change a lot. Although as far as systems languages go ALGOL was far better than C (ALGOL has now been around for 50 years, beating C, although not as widespread). I did a lot of OP MacApp, and the move to C++ just killed the elegance of it. I would have thought all us MA people moved to Cocoa which is more elegant.
I think applications technologies get fragmented. Like Eiffel for instance, where supporters started adding their own slants to things like SmallEiffel and Sather.
Maybe the move to Java has ended up damaging WO. Certainly, it just got so complex around the time of the move to Eclipse and Wonder - the "learning cliff" as Pascal put it - that seeing there weren't any other jobs around Sydney, I gave up. Still follow this group out of interest though.
More on topic, Apple have been given a hard time for always being behind with Java. Seems they would be better off for Oracle to actually bring their version of Java to OS X, although that would leave Apple with a Flash-like problem of waiting for a third party to do a good implementation on OS X. On the other hand, maybe Java is coming to the end of its life. As a language, it looks like Scala is better, although that runs on JVM, and perhaps as a platform, .net is better being more language neutral.
Perhaps Apple does need to be more open to other environments running in OS X. Even its own WO has followed a rocky path, so it is much more difficult for external people. From my comments on C and C++, I think that programming technology has hardly reached its potential yet and there is a long way to go. That means being open to new things and research and encouraging that to happen on Apple equipment. After all, it should be easier and more pleasant to do these things on than Windows or other versions of Unix. Computing needs to have more computing put back into it. That means giving people a platform for thinking, thinking different, and exploring.
Ian And there are untold numbers of applications written in those languages that are still in production.
Oh, and how long has UNIX been in production? Were most of us born yet when it first come out of Bell Labs?
And of course there is always the never ending life span of the underlying foundation of windows, aka MS-DOS, but let's not go there.
Old tools and technologies are not necessarily bad, they are just old (ie: Mature). If you use them well to craft elegant code, the result will live and be useful for a very long time.
Joel
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On Oct 22, 2010, at 9:14 AM, Ken Anderson wrote: OK, how about non-mainframe technology :) On Oct 22, 2010, at 8:55 AM, David BON wrote:
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