wjs@milton.u.washington.edu (William Jon Shipley) (11/17/90)
I've written a drawing program under X using hp widgets, and a newsreader under NeXTStep. It took me three weeks of reading manuals before I wrote any code for X. I believe it was a week or so before I had anything on the screen. It took me one evening with the NeXTStep manuals to create a working prototype for a graphical dungeon game on the NeXT. That's 12 hours from absolute ignorance to being able to draw a movable map in a ClipView. NeXTStep is a developer's dream. I believe firmly that NeXT will win the workstation wars. Not because of its nice user interface, but because of its nice programmer interface. I have yet to meet ANYONE who will argue that there is ANY interface which is as easy to program as the NeXT's. Right now, users can't see any reason to buy a system which doesn't have all the little programs they want when they can buy a $1000 Mac that does everything they think they ever want. In a few years, the NeXT will be the software leader, and people who bought Macs today will be kicking themselves. Why do I state this so unequivocally? Look at the Mac's history. Everyone points out that it, too, had no software when it started. The real question is, why did it get software? The TI99/4a also had no decent software when it was introduced. It never got any. So why was the Mac special? Because the Mac enabled the programmer to use advanced tools (windows et al) much easier than the IBM did. Eventually this was made clear in the superior usability of the Mac's software. I see it as the ultimate sign of the Mac's winning over IBM that you can no longer tell whether you are using, say, PageMaker on the IBM or Mac. New software on both machines now looks like Mac software. The NeXT is the current equivalent to the Mac: it makes writing graphic interfaces to your code MUCH easier. In fact, it pretty much obviates writing graphic interfaces: it's already written for you, you just plug in your code. NeXT may not be outselling IBM and Apple in five years, but I'll bet you anything that IBM and Apple both have development tools that look like NeXT's. I'd consider this a victory for NeXT. More importantly, it's a victory for the users. I have vowed not to do any more X (or Windows) development because it would be morally wrong: it would be supporting a system I find disgusting. The more software that exists for X, the longer it will take to polymorph into NeXTStep. We all lose. -william shipley