garl@nlm-mcs.arpa (Gary Letourneau) (11/04/88)
Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a demo of the NeXT machine
given by NeXT people at the University of Maryland. In short, let me say
that all the hype, all the newsgroup postings, and all the technical postings
together do not do justice to the machine! It is a marvelous, well thought
out system.
The hardware is indeed spectacular. While technical hardware advantages
are fleeting things, the NeXT machine exhibits such a high degree of system
integration, that it may be some time before others (read SUN, APPLE) follow
suit. You can't just slap a system like this together overnight. (A system
IS greater than the sum of its parts).
However, where NeXT machine wins, and wins BIG, is in its software. It
is this that may prove to be NeXT's greatest achievement. This machine
is an ideal software development platform. Its object-oriented flavor
(at both the hardware and software level) lends itself superbly to software
development. NeXT has provided a sorely needed programming tool in the
form of its Application Builder to greatly (and I mean greatly!) speed up
the development of a program's user interface. Furthermore, they have also
included a sweet of ready-to-use objects for inclusion within a program.
Naturally, it will take a while for users to get used to the new
environment; however, for programmers, the learning curve should be
dramatically shorter than those experienced when learning to program
in other windowed environments.
All in all, the NeXT machine looks like a programmer's dream machine.
garl@mcs.nlm.nih.gov