Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and early object-oriented programming (2016)

This is very narrow history. Basically a history that excludes everything that isn't Jobs walk to glory and perfection and domination. Ignore many important points, problems, accidents, alternatives and so on.

NeXT used 'Display Postscript' a display server that was basically a inferior copy of Sun's NeWS system. This was later changed because NeXT was to small and Adobe didn't want to support Display Postscript anymore. Sun of course killed NeWS because they wanted to be a 'standard'. Next didn't care about standards. They had less applications then CDE Unix, and far lower deployment in the 90s.

Objective C is one of many language that you could use to build UI libraries on top of some display system. Objective C wasn't the best or inherently better then many others. Objective C adoption by Next was kind of a historical accident based on office location.

Having something VM based for UI development isn't actually that much of an issue, when the hardware manufacture delivers the OS with the VM included. And usually it his the hardware manufacture that delivers the OS. And VM bases system can be integrated well with the core OS, object oriented or not. And that VM are inherently to slow is also questionable, specially for UI apps that can use C libraries and the Display Server for the most performance relevant stuff.

Apple itself had a very nice system for UI development on Dylan that was arguable better in many way then the Next system. But when Steve Jobs came and they had Next, that wasn't developed anymore.

What Jobs showed of in the late 90s wasn't exactly revolutionary stuff. But Jobs always presents everything as revolutionary.

IPhone development in 2010 working the same as Next development in 1990 is a sign of 'failure', not of success.

I think it's stretching the truth a little to say that Apple "had a very nice system for UI development on Dylan." The Dylan Eulogy site itself claims they hadn't even finished their Interface Builder [1] by the time it was canceled, which NeXT already had at the time.

As a side note, Apple Dylan seems incredibly limiting and opinionated for no reason. I find it interesting the website lamenting its death only shows screenshots [2][3][4] of the "advanced" editor, rather than any successful applications made using Dylan.

Also, how can I incrementally migrate Dylan into existing codebases, which were most likely C, at the time? Does it have an FFI? Also, most software engineers mental models at the time were imperative, and they expected them to learn the intricacies of functional programming and object-oriented at the same time?

That's not even to mention the logistics about running it:

> Keeping your source code in a fully version-tracked, object-oriented database with full metadata is an idea whose time has long since arrived, yet most of us still spend our time editing text files. Apple Dylan could export and import code from text files, but once you’ve used an IDE that takes advantage of fine-grained object storage of your source, you’ll never want to go back. [5]

Does this mean I'd need to shape my entire source control system around Apple Dylan? How would diffs and collaboration work? To use my source control system would I have to "export" it to plaintext every time? Text-based AppKit and Obj-C fit right into existing source control systems of the day.

Also Obj-C and AppKit was already dogfooded heavily within NeXT. The system UI was built using it, as well as all the apps that shipped with the system. You can't say that about Dylan and MacOS 9.

[1] https://opendylan.org/history/apple-dylan/screenshots/misc.h...

[2] https://opendylan.org/history/apple-dylan/screenshots/browse...

[3] https://opendylan.org/history/apple-dylan/screenshots/dynami...

[4] https://opendylan.org/history/apple-dylan/screenshots/index....

[5] https://opendylan.org/history/apple-dylan/eulogy.html