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From: telfeyan@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Roland Telfeyan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.objective-c
Subject: Re: How's Stepstone/Objective-C doing?
Message-ID: <1991Apr3.152110.15955@zip.eecs.umich.edu>
Date: 3 Apr 91 15:21:10 GMT
References: <CIMARRON.91Apr1004809@erewhon.postgres.Berkeley.EDU>
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept.
Lines: 27

In message <CIMARRON.91Apr1004809@erewhon.postgres.Berkeley.EDU>
cimarron@erewhon.postgres.Berkeley.EDU (Cimarron D. Taylor </>) writes:

> Brad Cox gave a talk here at Berkeley a few weeks ago.  I was
> given the impression that he was more interested in library
> developement than language development.  This is part of his
> philosophy of software reusability.
> 
> In particular, when someone asked him why the NeXT machine's
> do not come with the Stepstone class library, he said that
> Jobs wasn't interested in it.  Jobs apparently thought the
> language was more important than the library, while Cox
> believes that the library is more important than the language.

That's all rhetoric.  The real reason NeXT decided not to include
the Stepstone class library is because it was too buggy.  Believe
me, I've been programming the NeXT since its Sun cross-development
system (System 0.3) in 1988, and at that time it *was* included.
Our application made extensive use of it.  I forget whether it was
in 6.0 or 8.0 that the Stepstone class library was removed.  I got
the impression NeXT got tired of taking bug reports for Stepstone!
So NeXT substituted its own foundation library, a smaller set of
objects, but useful and reliable.

Roland Telfeyan                             roland@cpat.umich.edu
School of Music                             roland@gomidas.mi.org
University of Michigan      1100 Baits, Ann Arbor, MI  48109-2085