I went to the NeXT machine introduction. Read/write optical drive. Megapixel display. Mathematica. The compete works of William Shakespeare. I want that machine. It's so insanely great.
It's so insanely great that I don't care that there seems to be no way for a software developer to make a buck on it. It's so insanely great that I don't care that it's only going to be sold to higher education. It's so insanely great that I don't care that there seems to be no way for a writer to make a ... Well, maybe it's not so great.
Steve Jobs insists that the NeXT machine will be sold, read his lips, Only to Higher Education. Right. No new taxes.
Hard on the heels of NeXT's proof-of-concept media event comes a packet of press releases from Microsoft announcing its support for higher education. Is there a connection? Who knows, but speaking of being hard on the well heeled, Bill Gates has been galling the Jobs kibe lately by bad-mouthing the NeXT machine. Howcum?
My friend Thom Hogan thinks Bill's just annoyed that he can't get any legitimate press out of the NeXT announcement. Thom has been immersed in Mac technology since March, when he launched the Macintosh II Report(which I help him with). He doesn't think there's anything in the NeXT machine that Apple shouldn't be able to put into the Tower in a year or so. But he also admits, after doing some research into the matter, that he doesn't see how NeXT can make a decent profit selling the machine for $6,500, no matter how good a deal it made on memory. Something's funny there.
Jobs' insistence that his only market is higher education ("Fortune 500 companies in disguise") makes one curious about the language of his arrangement with Apple. I am very impressed with the machine. But I wonder about the company. What else does it have to sell, and to whom, and how? What's the rest of the NeXT strategy? Does Steve Jobs have another shoe to drop? And if so, on whom?
Proponents of the object-oriented programming paradigm defend it as lucid and realistic. It's lucid, they claim, in that it packages information neatly and allows for suppression of detail. Objects encapsulate information clearly. It's realistic, they claim, in that it represents the real world better than other paradigms do. Developing OOP objects is really modeling real-world objects and their interactions. Lucid and realistic.
Yes, but ... The sticky point comes when you consider multiple inheritance. No one since Roget has believed that real-world objects can be gathered into a single, all-encompassing hierarchy. The real world is saddled with real multiple inheritance. The keyboard I'm pounding on as I write this belongs to the class of tools and to the class of possessions of mine, and neither class encompasses the other. And doesn't multiple inheritance blow away the vaunted lucidity of object-oriented programming? Sure seems like it.
It begins to look like object-oriented programming can be lucid or realistic, but not both. No sex, please, we're software engineers.
Nothing is lost that can be reinvented. Forty years ago, engineers knew how to decompose a large problem into small tasks to be handled by separate processors. The processors weren't transputer chips, to be sure. Technology advances.
So does language. Back then, a computer was a human being. Rows of WACs, or in Britain WRENS, each punching keys on a desk calculator, each computing her tiny task of some large computing problem.
It's strange to reflect that electronic digital computers were invented to replace women. Stranger still to realize that, for some (male) programmers, the replacement seems to have succeeded beyond expectations. If this paragraph has nothing to do with you, please take no offense. But if you recognize yourself in this picture, take a break. Log off. Shut down. Talk to people.
Stan Kelly-Bootle: OK, so I'm overusing the P word. But that's my job, Stan; it's in my contract. It's clause 3b: "The party of the first part shall use the word [P word deleted] at every opportunity."
Jeff Duntemann: Rumor is you're going to be writing for the premier programmer's magazine. I think that's wonderful. Don't let them put any funny stuff in your contract.
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's Journal