October 13, 2006 — jao

While writing my latest post on NeXT, i remembered one of my favorite videos on programming ever: the 1992 demo presentation of NeXTSTEP 3 by, whom else, Steve Jobs. If you haven’t seen it yet, please take a look below, and keep repeating yourself that this was 1992, and that that machine had a clock under 50 MHz! One wonders what on Earth have we been doing during the last fourteen years.

I was about to write a brief overview of the amazing things demoed by Jobs, but the fine guys and gals of Rixstep have already done it for me: The object oriented cake is a guided tour for those of you lacking 35 minutes to see the movie. But i bet you’ll see it anyway after reading that article. More than once!

All these wonders where made using Objective-C. One would say that there’s something to OOP. Definitely, but there’s more than objects at play: Objective-C is a dynamical language, with a living runtime and powerful reflection capabilities. Despite its C-syntax (almost any C snippet is also an Objective-C snippet), its spirit is far closer to Smalltalk, and the right way to use Objective-C is to use it as a dynamically typed language. I’m convinced that these language traits were key to make the marvellous NeXSTEP system a thriving reality.

For the really curious among you, here‘s a bit more about the platform; and one can also take a look at the NeXTstep 3.3 developer documentation.