Red Hat Diaries/0012

Back to School

From my very first day at my very first programming job I was in charge of a multi-million dollar Unix project. While part of the reason was my reputation, another part was the unwillingness of the older COBOLers to 'go back to school'. I understand those old fogies more today - it's a rough step.

OSX is both Unix not Unix at the same time. The underpinnings - what Apple calls Darwin - are almost pure FreeBSD. But that's just the underpinnings. That's without the NeXTSTEP/Aqua interface. The GUI it totally based on NeXTSTEP - it's not just reminiscent, it 'is' NeXTSTEP, and the complexity is overwhelming. If MS programmers ever complain about the impossibility of navigating through windows.h, they need only open up any of the root level NS header files to be silenced into submission. While the layout is for the moment cleaner, the depth of detail here is beyond immediate grasp and comprehension. The root level headers include hundreds of lesser files - hundreds - and you have the AppKit root, you have the Foundation root, you have the Carbon and Cocoa roots, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

Oh, you could always write pure Unix console apps, but then you wouldn't get the dazzling Aqua interface. Like it or not, I'm into interfaces today. I think I probably know the Windows interface as well as anyone - and I know the build mechanism that well too. Learning it all over again - going back to school - is a gargantuan effort.

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