I think one factor is that good UI and UX is nearly always proprietary, so these great platforms get built but then ultimately die when the market moves on.

You no longer have window-independent focus. You cannot bind hotkeys to windowing events. You cannot toggle through all windows via alt-tab, you can't set focus-follows-mouse.

Source: I've been use WindowMaker (a NeXTstep clone) for 20 years.

Plus, I'm not sure how many of the things you mention are even changes relative to genuine NeXTSTEP rather than just differences from WindowMaker's imperfect emulation of it. Focus-follows-mouse was an X11 thing WindowMaker shoehorned into its NeXT-like environment; genuine NeXTSTEP was click-to-focus, though it could be hacked to emulate focus-follows-mouse: https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1994/_Mi...

It seems likely to me that all these dev tools from 1991 have something to do with why there are > 1M iPhone apps today. That and the enormous market attracting developers...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer

I personally liked the two being separate applications. IB is still great today, but it (and Xcode) slowed down noticeably when the two combined.

I think anytime I have to create a project in any software, it adds a wall of ceremony that just keep adding more layers. It's the difference between QuickTime Pro and iMovie for editing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:Fi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom#Programmin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

Paul Allen wrote an emulator for the microprocessor which run on PDP-10. He was able to extend his previous version of emulator for that.

At the time Microsoft developed MS-DOS (actually modifying the program they have bought), around 1981, they owned their own DECSYSTEM-2060:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20

[0]: https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRO_nY-d94w&t=22s

was done by then-just-software company named Psion on their VAX computer:

https://archive.org/stream/sinclair-user-magazine-036/Sincla...

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=3rd_Party_Develop...

Steve founded NeXT after getting fired from Apple, as is reflected in part by the name of the company. Apple acquired NeXT in 1996 for $429mm, which is how Steve Jobs came back to Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1996.E2.80.9397:_Apple_me...

[1] Well, what was then called OS X.

I still remember reading reviews of the NeXT OS as a child, wishing I had the hardware to run it (from memory I was still running a PC at the time - an original IBM PC, which was considered a dinosaur even then).

Um, what? Steve founded NeXT and was with them with Apple bought them out for the OS.

You could do the same video with Delphi vs. Visual C++ playing in the 90s.

But when I do use Meteor for a project, I feel exactly like the NeXT developer in this video.

Though I would say I don't think he was portrayed badly in this video, the point was not that he was a problem, the point was that NeXT's application development environment is better.

> At this point, we threw the programmers an unexpected but not unrealistic curve.

> Like a typical user, we asked them to add a feature not in the original spec. In this case, a button would recall all the trouble logs for a particular customer.

> Using NeXT Step, the NeXT programmer completed the task in about 20 minutes.

> [NeXT progammer discussing some details]

> The sun programmer also estimated a time of 20 minutes, but it took about 45 before he was ready to test his version.

This was about 20 hours in, which means that since they started on Wed, 30 October 1991 and assuming maximum 8-hour days, they have missed Halloween and would be at least halfway into Friday. The video states that the programmers finished on Sat, 2 November.

The video goes on to state that the NeXT system enabled the NeXT programmer to add a number of features such as system fonts and button icons "for free", which goes to show that the video's intended audience are managers and executives of software development teams who would of course want faster development, ad hoc requests, and cost-free features.

I personally would have been tempted to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ once they announced a planned "unexpected" feature request because rather than train users and customers to frontload requirements in order to benefit from the design decisions that would be made as a result, the video encourages customers to believe their out-of-spec requests will be more quickly accommodated if only their programmers were using object-oriented NeXT Step.

25 years later, we know the truth about how easy it is to shoehorn in 11th-hour feature requests when using object-oriented code.

EDIT: link to specified timecode; formatting; additional detail about date code was written.

> than train users and customers to frontload requirements in order to benefit from the design decisions

No matter how much training we give customers, the very best they can do is give us the reasonably foreseeable requirements. That was maybe possible for a couple of decades when our main job as an industry was to take well-evolved paper processes and put them on a computer. Even then, though, people were getting better results by shipping every few days in response to observing actual user experience.

I don't think trying to frontload requirements works anymore, though. Startups are effectively machines for learning. We can't predict what learning will happen; if we could, we wouldn't be learning. And those startups are creating change for everybody else, making it impossible to know what competitive challenges might arise tomorrow.

So I think it's time for us to stop pretending we can get everybody else to freeze the world just because it's more convenient for a particular set of design techniques.

> 25 years later, we know the truth about how easy it is to shoehorn in 11th-hour feature requests when using object-oriented code.

I was a NeXT programmer back then. 25 years later, it is much easier to add feature requests to OO codebases. The three big differences: automated testing is common and easy; refactoring a design is a well-understood process; and you can deploy to millions of people with zero additional cost or work beyond committing and pushing to master. Which in turn means that the whole notion of "11th hour" is dissolving. Which hour is the 11th if you're releasing a few times per day?

However, many shops still release annually, quarterly, and bi-monthly. Also many shops don't have smooth sprints, their development processes being somewhere between Agile and Waterfall. I've worked in two such shops.

I'm not naysaying you, just adding that I think your insights apply to a different model of development than the one I'm thinking about in my previous comment.

I don't understand this part. You said you're assuming 8-hour work days. AFAIK, it's not at all common to take Halloween off from work. So what's the point of mentioning that day?

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1425/

Still an enjoyable video.

NeXT vs Sun head-to-head programming competition (1991) [video]

Meanwhile, in another universe from this video, 1991 was the same year that Visual Basic was released. The rest is history there.

Ultimately, the plan of having NeXT's tools on dedicated hardware paid off.. but it took another 20 years for it to happen, and the target hardware was consumer hardware costing 1/50th of what's shown here.

Edit: Doesn't look like it. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/182070

Yeah HTML does layout, what about everything else?

Where are the promised components, without frameworks faking them on top of a HTML, CSS, JavaScript?

Apparently each browser still implements just part of it.

Or a designer tooling to make use of such components in RAD way like VB.

:-D

That's supercomputer stuff... maybe...