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From: bzs@WORLD.STD.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Grumpy about Dopey Window Systems...
Message-ID: <9102050616.AA19034@world.std.com>
Date: 5 Feb 91 06:16:03 GMT
References: <9102050555.AA05527@june.cs.washington.edu>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
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Actually, yes, I've used NextStep (and I've probably written more
lines of window code than most people you know, so this isn't just an
end-user view, tho I think the end-user situation is particularly
ugly, when I program I expect some amount of complexity.)

I found the NeXT to be interesting, but it's unfortunate they got
involved in Objective C which remains "yet another lousy objectish
programming language". It's too bad people think this sort of thing is
"object-oriented" programming.

Their application developer, whatever they call it, is also
interesting, but demonstrates how hard this sort of thing is. A small
change to the interface often invalidated or confused all the work
thus far (at least in my experience.) It was also quite hard to do
anything that they hadn't explicitly anticipated, and that set seemed
a little limiting. I don't think these were merely bugs, I think they
were up against a fundamentally difficult problem!

Most frustrating was the realization that all their demo programs (at
least at the time) were basically building bitmaps in memory and
blit'ing them to the screen, totally avoiding most of their own
interface. I quickly found out why, it was the only way to get a crisp
update. And I thought *I* was doing something wrong...sigh.

HOWEVER...it would probably be a good idea for everyone interested in
these sorts of systems to take a good look at the NeXT.

And then think about what these interfaces should be.

Well, now I've flamed just about all window systems for Unix I think,
that's some sort of accomplishment for one day :-)

Seriously, I was flaming all the OS's in 1977 also. In retrospect, I
think I was right to do so. Dissatisfaction is the mother of invention.

        -Barry Shein

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