::scr tell me why you're using OSX, you big geek

[Paul Mison]

Like you expected *me* not to post to *this* thread...

On 05/12/2001 at 16:28 +0000, simon wistow wrote:
>On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 02:56:13AM -0800, celia romaniuk said:
>> One of the traditional reasons people dissed Macs was because they
>>didn't
>> like being able to get 'under the hood'. Is being able to do this in
>>OSX a
>> compelling reason to start using it?
>
>Well, sort of. You can't really get under the hood of Windows either but
>there were better development enviroments for that. Plus x86 hardware
>wasn't so expensive and you could upgrade/fix it yourself and boot into
>windows to play games.

This sounds a little like the arguments Neal Stephenson uses in 'In The
Beginning...' [0]. He does say, briefly, why he stopped using Macs.

I've not used any Windows development environments, nor, really, MPW
[1]. However, I know a few people who really like MPW, and I wonder if
it had been an free optional extra (or just *cheaper*) back in '84 or
'87, whether the deluge of share (and pay) ware that helped make
Windows dominant wouldn't have happened. [2] [3]

There's also the issue that, perhaps, the rigorousness of the Apple
Human Interface Guidelines, and the percieved overhead of writing for
GUIs, didn't doom Mac programming to a hardcore few no matter how easy
you made it to join in. (I think there's a framework called MacApp that
makes it a fair bit easier, but, as I said, I've never really played
with MPW.)

Personally, I'm not sure how much you can get under the hood of OS X
either. Sure, it ships with the derivations of the NeXT programming
tools, but you can't really mess with Aqua, or Quartz, or any of the
blocks of stuff that makes OS X different from Darwin. The closed-ness
of these layers is probably one of the things leading me to not move to
OS X- the years of add-ons to System 7 and co that aren't there yet
(FinderPop, Liteswitch, Amico, Snitch; that sort of thing), and it
seems the authors of these things don't expect OS X to allow them to
build their niches (see http://www.finderpop.com/, for example).
Perhaps, to be fair, I should compare OS X to an unmodified OS 9
install.

>Although I do like having shell scripting so that I can do simple
>tasks such as grep through all my mail for occurences of phrases and
>stuff. Chaining stuff through pipes is powerful AND fun!

AppleScript is powerful but, to a programmer, fugly. It's very badly
understood and pretty flakily supported, though. (Mind you, I'm sure
there are a fair few Linux apps (probably recent, badly written,
graphical ones) that screw piping over.)

Oh, and there's this handy text processing (and more!) language called
Perl, and there's this port called MacPerl, which can come in handy...

Still, yes, a proper shell and proper pipes are good, which is why MPW
provides at least the first.

>I have got to love the taskbar of MacOS (n<X)

Eh? You mean the Application Switcher, or the Liteswitch alt-tab
emulation extension?

>> And above all: where does this leave the 'number of mouse buttons'
>> debate'?

Forked to another post, tomorrow, when I have a bit more time to make
sure I'm cogent (and not entering barbecue territory). I mean, it's
taken me far too long to write just this.

[0] Linked somewhere off cryptonomicom.com, and in many other places. I'd
    hope we've all got local copies by now anyway.

[1] Macintosh Programmers Workshop. If you really care, it's a free
    download from developer.apple.com

[2] I wasn't really around, but it seems to me that in the mid to late
    eighties, no-one thought shipping a real development environment
    (something, I think, that QBasic probably isn't) for free was a good
    idea. MPW was probably then as much as cash cow for Apple as I'm
    sure Visual Studio is now for Microsoft.

    One thing I give a lot of credit to Linux (and the BSDs, although
    they never got the hype) for is the idea that yes, your (free!) OS
    comes with a fairly nifty set of programming tools; an approach that
    probably led first to the free downloads of MPW and later to the
    whole Developer Tools OS X CD. [4]

[3] Even now, one of the MS OSes selling points is breadth of apps, even
    compared to Linux, despite the development environment issue [2].

[4] Probably a bit long for a footnote. Ah well.

--
:: paul
:: beware my prophetic chickens