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From: mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: The Three Religions of NeXT X
Message-ID: <14378@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 14 Jan 91 20:43:37 GMT
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Organization: Mendou Zaibatsu, Tomobiki-Cho, Butsumetsu-Shi
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There seem to be three religions on the subject of X on the NeXT
expressed on this newsgroup.

#1 says that interoperability is of supreme importance, even at the
expense of ugliness.  Anything, no matter how gross, is accepted as
long as the job gets done.  This religion is called UNIXism.

#2 says that interoperability is of negative importance, and that it
is best to have a machine that is wonderful and pure.  The rest of the
world is a bunch of cretins who deserve to suffer and should be
ignored.  Eventually the cretins will suffer enough and move to the
True Religion.  This religion is called Amigaism, the modern-day form
of ITSism.

#3 says that X is a total disgusting crock that is so bad that it must
be stamped out, no matter what work is impacted.  It doesn't matter if
there isn't any alternate, or that the proferred alternative isn't all
that great either.  This religion is called Macism.

The #2 and #3 religions are different, even if they appear similar; #2
is a conscious and perverse desire to be incompatible.  All of us have
been guilty of #3 thinking from time to time.

In this case, I'm in the #1 camp.  Frankly, I don't think that
NextStep is all that great.  Yes, internally it is much prettier than
X.  But there are only a fraction of the number of applications for
NextStep that there are for X, and NextStep is only readily available
on a single platform.

The real killer, though, is that NextStep is proprietary.  If NextStep
was a quantum leap above X it may have survived this, but it isn't.
I've done enough programming in NextStep to conclude that this emperor
has no clothes.  There are some gross kludges in NextStep.

NextStep is neat, but I don't think it's going to take over the world.
It's like the Amigoids who constantly bash the Mac; the Mac is a
Fischer-Price toy and consequently is easy to bash.  But, of the boxes
of that technology (Mac, Amiga, Atari ST), which has been the big
seller?  Sad but true.

What is a NeXT?  It's either an incompatible, expensive PC (all the
problems of the Mac without the advantage of a big customer base) or
it's a cheap workstation with compatibility problems.  I would not
want to be in that market position right now.

The Mac won big because of the pent-up demand for engines with a Xerox
interface; people were willing to overlook its exhorbitant cost and
limited capabilities.  NeXT, I think, is selling machines based on
pent-up demand for an affordable personal UNIX workstation.  [Let me
ask you, would you move to release 3.0 if NeXT yanked all the Unix
compatibility stuff out -- that is, if all you got was Mach with
NextStep on top of it?]

Spouting our religions and flames is fun, but let's take a step back
and try to ask ourselves -- who we are, what we are, what is our
machine, what do we want of it.  To the #2 and #3 camps, which is more
important, keeping X off the NeXT or NeXT being around two years from
now?

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