Red Hat Diaries/007a

It's Easy

There's a story continually passed around the Apple developers community: that of a wise old NextStep guru who once said that if you're having a difficult time programming anything in Cocoa/NextStep, you're going about it the wrong way.

Despite considerable effort on the part of many, no one has been able to identify this wise old guru, much less locate him. The statement stands on its own, with no one to defend it, and the corollary - namely that Cocoa programming is easy - is implied very insistently.

Yet a quick perusal of the Apple developers mailing lists will convince anyone that Apple programming is anything but easy. And the most accessible logical wedge: If it is so easy, and if everyone is expected to find out how easy it is, how come so many have such difficulties finding this out?

As an OO development environment, Cocoa does not differ much from predecessors such as OWL. Provided you've planned on developing your application within the narrow confines of the wide-awake system developer who wrote the system, you'll be fine. The trouble starts when you look without preconception at a new requirement spec and start thinking about how you're going to materialise the whole thing.

Flexibility implies stability; a system that is not flexible is not going to be stable either. Flexibility implies considerable work on code to make it perform succinctly and correctly. 'Hacks' are not flexible, and thus rarely stable. In a good code lab such as Radsoft's, code is continually whittled down, design patterns are discovered, efficiencies are found - and the code becomes more flexible and gains a level of stability in the process.

We're talking operating systems here: We're talking the kinds of things client users have come to take for granted. We're talking about the ability to change a desktop theme. We're talking about basic accessibility rights for the handicapped.

We're talking about enough flexibility in an API to program most anything, and not just the eighteen projects found in Apple's /Applications folder. We're talking about progress - or lack thereof - over the past six years.

Steve Jobs was wooed back to Apple in 1996. That's six years ago. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer needed only six years to bring Windows to version 3.0 and thereby offer a relatively mature product.

Jobs's six years are up. Apple has nothing to show for all the fanfare and switch ads. Cocoa does not have a fraction of the functionality of its predecessor, or of the old MacOS. The system design has not been updated to reflect new priorities. The system has not yet had its first encounter with the real world. Remember: only 50,000 NeXT boxes were ever sold - that's Paltry with a big 'P'.

The Apple development team sit in their ivory tower, and keep mumbling their mantra, that everything is all right, that they're still years ahead of the competition, and that any sign of difficulty is because the new generation of developers still can't find out how easy it is.

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