Re:What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?
by wpietri on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @10:25AM
(#25210146)
Great description. Two things I'd add to that: NeXT's Smalltalk heritage, with what I think of as real object orientation, was great for UI programming. Objects on screen were actually objects that you could message. And Display Postscript made it much easier to get visually solid results.
I can't remember where I read this, but the basic notion was that the Mac was easy to use but hard to program, limiting its adoption. Jobs learned a lesson in that he wanted his NeXT machine to be easy to use and easy to program.
As you say, it might all seem a bit tatty now. The web has raised the game of interface creation quite a bit. But this was in the late 1980s, where a lot of what they did was revolutionary.
I can't remember where I read this, but the basic notion was that the Mac was easy to use but hard to program, limiting its adoption. Jobs learned a lesson in that he wanted his NeXT machine to be easy to use and easy to program.
As you say, it might all seem a bit tatty now. The web has raised the game of interface creation quite a bit. But this was in the late 1980s, where a lot of what they did was revolutionary.