Java on MacOS dead ?

In article ,
wrote:

> I came across a usenet post stating that Cocoa will no longer provide
> Java bindings. Is that correct ?

It appears to be, but that's a very different state of affairs than
"Java on Mac OS dead."

> As a long-time MFC programmer who recently switched to Mac I am trying
> to find some framework to use. Carbon and C seems like it requires a
> lot of extra effort , and my eyes are still hurting from Objective-C
> tutorials, ...

Um. Why? What about them in particular did you find challenging? Cocoa's
a very worthwhile starting point for mainstream Mac OS development, and
worth the effort to learn. But it really, honestly, shouldn't be a
tremendous effort for someone capable of coping with MFC (intellectually
and emotionally). Some of the simplest tutorials I've seen are more than
a tad contrived. Was that it?

G

--
"Congurutulation!!!" - The subject line on some spam I received recently.
I have no idea what it means, but it's such a cool "word" (by which I mean
pronouncable sequence of letters) regardless.
 >> Stay informed about: Java on MacOS dead ? 

It's not that I find Cocoa particularly challenging- since Borland and
MS heavily borrowed from NextStep it's pretty much straightforward. I
am just very annoyed by Objective-C which seems clunky. That's why I
was hoping to use the framework as well as Interface Builder but with a
different language.

Sorry for the misleading title, obviously Java won't die until Sun
pulls the plug on it.
 >> Stay informed about: Java on MacOS dead ? 

In article ,
wrote:

> It's not that I find Cocoa particularly challenging- since Borland and
> MS heavily borrowed from NextStep it's pretty much straightforward. I
> am just very annoyed by Objective-C which seems clunky.

I might suggest that where you wrote "clunky" it might be better to say
"different from what I'm used to." It's actually quite elegant, but the
paradigm's a significantly different from what a lot of developers are
used to and the syntax was developed (before Obj-C, I should point out)
partly to highlight that difference.

So, having said that, I'd recommend giving it a bit more of a chance
with the recognition that it really is something new and not just a
gratuitously different way to write the same old stuff.

--
"Congurutulation!!!" - The subject line on some spam I received recently.
I have no idea what it means, but it's such a cool "word" (by which I mean
pronouncable sequence of letters) regardless.
 >> Stay informed about: Java on MacOS dead ? 

Gregory Weston wrote:
> In article ,
> wrote:
>
>> It's not that I find Cocoa particularly challenging- since Borland and
>> MS heavily borrowed from NextStep it's pretty much straightforward. I
>> am just very annoyed by Objective-C which seems clunky.
>
> I might suggest that where you wrote "clunky" it might be better to say
> "different from what I'm used to." It's actually quite elegant, but the
> paradigm's a significantly different from what a lot of developers are
> used to and the syntax was developed (before Obj-C, I should point out)
> partly to highlight that difference.
>
> So, having said that, I'd recommend giving it a bit more of a chance
> with the recognition that it really is something new and not just a
> gratuitously different way to write the same old stuff.
>

Isn't the object-oriented part of Obj-C based on Smalltalk's syntax?
Smalltalk was developed by Alan Kay and company to make programming
accessible to kids. Hence the name SMALL-talk...

Alan's still working on Smalltalk, by the way.

http://www.squeak.org
 >> Stay informed about: Java on MacOS dead ? 

glenn andreas wrote:
> In article ,
> Lawson English wrote:
>
>> Gregory Weston wrote:
>>> In article ,
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> It's not that I find Cocoa particularly challenging- since Borland and
>>>> MS heavily borrowed from NextStep it's pretty much straightforward. I
>>>> am just very annoyed by Objective-C which seems clunky.
>>> I might suggest that where you wrote "clunky" it might be better to say
>>> "different from what I'm used to." It's actually quite elegant, but the
>>> paradigm's a significantly different from what a lot of developers are
>>> used to and the syntax was developed (before Obj-C, I should point out)
>>> partly to highlight that difference.
>>>
>>> So, having said that, I'd recommend giving it a bit more of a chance
>>> with the recognition that it really is something new and not just a
>>> gratuitously different way to write the same old stuff.
>>>
>> Isn't the object-oriented part of Obj-C based on Smalltalk's syntax?
>
> Yes, very much so.
>
>> Smalltalk was developed by Alan Kay and company to make programming
>> accessible to kids. Hence the name SMALL-talk...
>>
>> Alan's still working on Smalltalk, by the way.
>>
>> http://www.squeak.org
>
> Smalltalk was named such because it was originally very SMALL (like
> originally written in a page of code).

No and noway was Smalltalk ever "small" in that sense. It was the first
full featured GUI system, which always requires huge amounts of memory
and code to implement. Here's what Alan Kay says about the name. Note
that Smalltalk grew out of KiddiKomp:

http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html

The Early History of Smalltalk

Alan C. Kay
Apple Computer


"In the summer of '71 I refined the KiddiKomp idea into a tighter design
called miniCOM. It used a bit-slice approach like the NOVA 1200, had a
bit-map display, a pointing device, a choice of "secondary" (really
tertiary) storages, and a language I now called "Smalltalk"--as in
"programming should be a matter of ..." and "children should program in
....". The name was also a reaction against the "IndoEuropean god theory"
where systems were named Zeus, Odin, and Thor, and hardly did anything.
I figured that "Smalltalk" was so innocuous a label that if it ever did
anything nice people would be pleasantly surprised."

>
> Cocoa (the name, not the framework), on the other hand, was originally a
> system designed for teaching kids how to program developed in Apple's
> ATG.

Tableau begat KidSim, which begat Cocoa, which begat StageCast. However,
Alan says they abandoned it "early on." He's been working on
Smalltalk-based stuff at Apple, then Disney and now via a private
foundation since forever.

His current research focus is Squeak Etoys programming based on Squeak
Smalltalk.

http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essays.html
 >> Stay informed about: Java on MacOS dead ? 

In article ,
Lawson English wrote:

> glenn andreas wrote:
> > In article ,
> > Lawson English wrote:
> >
> >> Gregory Weston wrote:
> >>> In article ,
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> It's not that I find Cocoa particularly challenging- since Borland and
> >>>> MS heavily borrowed from NextStep it's pretty much straightforward. I
> >>>> am just very annoyed by Objective-C which seems clunky.
> >>> I might suggest that where you wrote "clunky" it might be better to say
> >>> "different from what I'm used to." It's actually quite elegant, but the
> >>> paradigm's a significantly different from what a lot of developers are
> >>> used to and the syntax was developed (before Obj-C, I should point out)
> >>> partly to highlight that difference.
> >>>
> >>> So, having said that, I'd recommend giving it a bit more of a chance
> >>> with the recognition that it really is something new and not just a
> >>> gratuitously different way to write the same old stuff.
> >>>
> >> Isn't the object-oriented part of Obj-C based on Smalltalk's syntax?
> >
> > Yes, very much so.
> >
> >> Smalltalk was developed by Alan Kay and company to make programming
> >> accessible to kids. Hence the name SMALL-talk...
> >>
> >> Alan's still working on Smalltalk, by the way.
> >>
> >> http://www.squeak.org
> >
> > Smalltalk was named such because it was originally very SMALL (like
> > originally written in a page of code).
>
> No and noway was Smalltalk ever "small" in that sense.

From the below cited article:

The subject pf power came up and the two of them wondered how large a
language one would have to make to get great power. With as much panache
as I could muster, I asserted that you could define the "most powerful
language in the world" in "a page of code." They said, "Put up or shut
up."



So the core concept of Smalltalk (the language) was small, not resource
requirements of the whole environment built around it.


> It was the first
> full featured GUI system, which always requires huge amounts of memory
> and code to implement.

There was also "TinyTalk" <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802845>
- a simple implementation design for "a conventional microprocessor such
as a Z80 or 6502" which "actually did fit in 64K bytes with a little bit
of room to spare".


> Here's what Alan Kay says about the name. Note
> that Smalltalk grew out of KiddiKomp:
>
> http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html
>
> The Early History of Smalltalk
>
> Alan C. Kay
> Apple Computer
>
>
> "In the summer of '71 I refined the KiddiKomp idea into a tighter design
> called miniCOM. It used a bit-slice approach like the NOVA 1200, had a
> bit-map display, a pointing device, a choice of "secondary" (really
> tertiary) storages, and a language I now called "Smalltalk"--as in
> "programming should be a matter of ..." and "children should program in
> ...". The name was also a reaction against the "IndoEuropean god theory"
> where systems were named Zeus, Odin, and Thor, and hardly did anything.
> I figured that "Smalltalk" was so innocuous a label that if it ever did
> anything nice people would be pleasantly surprised."
>

I wouldn't interpret that this says "SMALL-talk" (because small kids
would use it to program) so much as "small talk" (as in "polite
conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters"), which could
easily be approached by non computer scientists (including children).
But you are right that "small" didn't mean "small resource requirements".


Facinating paper to read, BTW - definitely delves deeper than the
"Smalltalk 80: Bits of History, Words of Advice" (another great book to
read). Thanks for the pointers...
 >> Stay informed about: Java on MacOS dead ? 

glenn andreas wrote:
> In article ,
> Lawson English wrote:
[...]
> From the below cited article:
>
> The subject pf power came up and the two of them wondered how large a
> language one would have to make to get great power. With as much panache
> as I could muster, I asserted that you could define the "most powerful
> language in the world" in "a page of code." They said, "Put up or shut
> up."
>
>
>
> So the core concept of Smalltalk (the language) was small, not resource
> requirements of the whole environment built around it.
>

Yeah, but it was "glacial," and didn't do anything past 3+7. By the time
it was implemented on a Mac, it was a "bit" larger:

http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/squeak/oopsla_squeak.html

"However, the Apple image format was limited by its use of indirect
pointers and an object table. Worse yet, the original interpreter
consisted of 120 pages of sparsely commented 68020 assembly code that
had passed through the hands of seven authors. Portable it was not."



One of the goals of Squeak when Alan was working as Technology VP at
Disney Imagineering, was to be able to implement it on virtually any
system, including Disney-branded PDAs (I think that the OS of the Mickey
Mouse (squeak!) PDA that tourists get at Disneyland IS written in
Squeak, but not sure).

They've got the portability thing down really well now. BTW, squeak.org
is a goldmine of info, historical and current, on Smalltalk and OOP:

http://www.squeak.org/Features/TheSqueakVM/

"The Squeak Virtual Machine broadly follows the specification of chapter
27 of the Blue Book, which is available at
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/bluebook/bluebook_chapter27.html.

It is written in Slang, which is a functional subset of Smalltalk which
is able to be translated into standard C. Squeak essentially uses the C
language as a cross-platform equivalent of assembly language.

Since Slang is a subset of Smalltalk, the Squeak virtual machine can be
edited and debugged by running it in Squeak itself. The picture below
shows Squeak within Squeak - the bottom right corner of the screen is a
Squeak image being run within the main image. (Click on the picture to
see it at full size).

The virtual machine can also be extended with plugins, written in either
C or Slang. These are used in Squeak for such things as playing MPEGs
and for Squeak's built in public key encryption abilities."

[...]
>
> Facinating paper to read, BTW - definitely delves deeper than the
> "Smalltalk 80: Bits of History, Words of Advice" (another great book to
> read). Thanks for the pointers...


Your welcome. BTW, Alan's main focus has always been on kids and to a
lesser extent on neophyte users and programmers in general. Check out
the http://www.squeakland.org website for more info on where Alan's
research and Squeak are headed. A lot of very famous computer scientists
and pioneers pop in for a chat in the Squeak and Squeakland forums, or
so I recall.
 >> Stay informed about: Java on MacOS dead ?