Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!apple!bionet!hayes.ims.alaska.edu!accuvax.nwu.edu!casbah.acns.nwu.edu!jln
From: jln@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (John Norstad)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Not another NeXT defector???!!!
Message-ID: <904@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
Date: 7 Nov 90 20:46:56 GMT
Sender: news@casbah.acns.nwu.edu
Organization: Northwestern University
Lines: 45
References:<2909@unccvax.uncc.edu> <1990Nov4.084938.22146@cs.ucla.edu> <15549@venera.isi.edu> <1990Nov6.212848.10254@agate.berkeley.edu>

In article <1990Nov6.212848.10254@agate.berkeley.edu> 
knrgroup@garnet.berkeley.edu (Raymond group) writes:

> Never used a NeXT, eh?  NeXT hides Unix under a GUI that, IMHO, is even
> easier to use than a Mac's.  A Unix expert would be hard pressed to 
> figure out that Unix was actually running under all the pretty windows
> on a NeXT. If you need to do something on a NeXT that you could do on a
> Mac, it is as easy or easier to do as on a Mac (with some minor 
exceptions:
> I still prefer the horizontal menu bars on the Mac over the vertical main
> menus on the NeXT).  

God, I'm going to regret having jumped into this war of words.

I'm not a NeXT user or progammer, although from what I've seen and heard 
the NeXT looks great.  I am a Mac user and programmer.  I've always been 
curious about one thing about the NeXT: If the NeXT GUI is so great, why 
is it that whenever I look over the shoulder of a NeXT user on our campus, 
I invariably see him or her typing away the same old UNIX commands in a 
terminal window?  Same comment applies to X-Windows for that matter.  I 
remain completely unconvinced that any sort of GUI tacked on top of UNIX 
(or DOS) can every completely hide all the ugly complexities of UNIX (or 
DOS) underneath the GUI.  Our experience here at NU is that you really do 
need to be a UNIX hacker to successfully install, maintain, and use a 
NeXT, or at least you frequently require the assistance of such a hacker. 
Here at NU we have a staff of NeXT experts to help people install, 
configure, and maintain their systems.  Our Mac users don't require 1% of 
the technical help our NeXT users do.

Another question: Have the people who think that Interface Builder is so 
superior to the Mac ever tried Apple's latest versions of Object 
Pascal/C++/MacApp/Mouser/ViewEdit/Inspector etc.?  I haven't done any 
major projects using either system yet (hope to soon), but I've seen both 
and read a great deal about both, and their similarities seem much 
stronger than their differences.  They both seem to me to be mature 
object-oriented development environments with good compilers, class 
libraries, interface construction tools, inspectors and other debugging 
tools, and class browsers.   Is one really all that superior to the other, 
or are we just picking nits here?  I've seen fantastic examples of how 
easy it is to implement full blown user interfaces on both platforms.

John Norstad
Academic Computing and Network Services
Northwestern University
jln@casbah.acns.nwu.edu