Checked this on wikipedia, and MkLinux came out after they bought Next. ("The mach kernel company"). But obviously everyone in this space knew about Linux.
Scully and Gasse made the Macintosh II line successful by marketing expensive workstations to creative professionals. That was against Jobs' "vision" so of course he discounts it. One thing which has never changed: Apple won't lift their finger unless they get a 30% margin.
We probably don't disagree on much but nuanced details, which is why I said it was a "strange claim" instead of "incorrect".
Being a retro-head who lived through those days obsessively watching every twist and turn... with "strange claim" I was trying to convey it's a "commercial success" is a nuanced judgement on which reasonable people can disagree and any such absolute claims require clear definition of terms, scopes and time frames.
The big issue with Wince was mobile IE was just an awful browser. I probably was not alone in wanting some 'webtop' gadget, but these weren't it. (In other words, iOS safari really was a killer app.)
No. The 'old school' hated 538 and polling wonks in general. Back in the 2000s there was a huge push back because this blog guy had numbers going against whatever narrative they were trying spin.
Jobs was going around trying to sell this to programmers at wall street banks and etc, so he definitely understood that stuff (beyond the drag-n-drop sense). You can probably find some demos on youtube.
Its basically true that there wasn't anything like the Java class library widely available in 1988.
Not sure what point exactly you are making. But the Wall Street Journal had a bunch of stuff about Apple engaging what was later known as 'Enron-style accounting'. They were a big company, and they did have a serious cashflow problem. So they needed a bailout from someone. (which happened to be Microsoft rather than wall street)
Also disagree with GP's point - Apple is definitely not Next. Next was an enterprise software company. If they were more successful they would be in the same category as Oracle.
What? Next an enterprise software company is one of the weirdest takes i’ve ever heard in my 3 decades in the industry. They were a workstation manufacturer with impressively cute UIs and an interesting software stack over MachOS
NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was the native API for the OPENSTEP (note the capitalization) operating system and was also available for Sun Solaris and even for Windows. I have a CD named OPENSTEP Enterprise, which is installable on Windows NT and Windows 95. There was also Portable Distributed Objects, which was NeXT’s take on distributed objects, which was big in the 90s (like CORBA). Finally, NeXT had a web server named WebObjects that had major customers such as Chrysler in 1996.
At the time Apple purchased NeXT, NeXT was definitely an enterprise software company. The black workstations were gone, the operating system was not marketed to casual users but to developers and others who needed software that used the OpenStep API, and it sold various developer tools.
All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).
Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)
eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.
I can believe that, but I recall some tradepress article about more than 100 companies selling non-java 'web middleware' who got bowled over by J2EE, and otherwise Next would have just been another one of those. That was Sun's strategy, not Next's.
WebObjects was fundamentally just a bad abstraction, so good thing too.
Hey PJ, I like your posts because you have the historical background on a lot of this stuff that industry has mostly forgotten.
But... Since you mentioned it, I actually have read J2EE and WebObjects documentation. And I conclude that WebObjects was shit. It drew the 'Web MVC' line at the completely wrong place. Nobody ever cared about about DOEs or whatever, they just wanted a database driver. You look at this huge pile of industry crap and its no wonder why Rails was successful.
I think its a good question, just because the whole UB thing is such an ideological shibboleth.
Maybe its better to think about this in the reverse, where C and C++ has 'defined behavior', but unsafe rust intentionally does not, its just whatever the complier and platform lets you get away with. Ultimately its still just a computer which stores values in memory and jumps to subroutines.
Every language has defined behavior. It's what you expect to happen through a program's execution. Sometimes there will be multiple possibilities, but you can still define them regardless. Laying this out explicitly is the purpose of a standard.
Undefined behavior is everything else. C and C++ are relatively unique in that their standards explicitly say "combining these constructs in this way is undefined", and we call those cases explicit UB. There's also a larger universe of implicit UB that standards omit. Most (all?) languages have implicit UB, even if they lack the explicit stuff. What happens when you get ENOMEM is a common one.
Rust does something similar to C/C++ and lists a bunch of UB that's only possible with incorrect code in unsafe blocks. Correct code placed in an unsafe block remains defined, as does code without unsafe (up to compiler/language bugs).
Yeah, if I understand correctly, the Rust project has no intention to formally 'define' what unsafe actually does, so its very implicit. Could be anything... so it's the Does It Work? standard.
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