from Hacker News

The legacy of NeXT lives on in OS X (2012)

by Bondi_Blue on 12/20/24, 4:57 AM with 254 comments

• by jasoneckert on 12/22/24, 2:18 PM

  As a longtime NeXTSTEP user, I still remember the first time I perused the filesystem of Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) in 2001. And I distinctly remember thinking to myself that Apple basically took NeXTSTEP and slapped their own window manager and app framework on it only. The filesystem and toolset was nearly identical, and I even found several config files (I don't remember which ones) that still had NeXTSTEP listed in the comments.

  As I evolved to develop iOS apps in the 2010s, NSObject (NS=NeXTSTEP) continued to be a reminder of this same lineage.

• by vintagedave on 12/22/24, 11:19 AM

  I remember the Unix-ness was a big part of OS X’s nerd popularity. People were talking about real Unix terminals, for example.

  Later Windows also aimed for the same thing with their new console app and Linux support. Yet macOS has remained the same. The Terminal app feels essentially unchanged and there’s no good app package service (eg brew etc - these are third party and can mess up your system.)

  Even Xcode is, well… look how extensions were restricted.

  Modern macOS feels boring, but also not aimed at developers.

• by keyle on 12/22/24, 8:19 AM

  It's amazing that still today, you find NSStrings and NS prefixed stuff all over working code.

  It's actually hard not to know anything about the old Appkit, as much as Apple would have you believe that it's all SwiftUI now.

• by larusso on 12/22/24, 11:25 AM

  Around 2010, I started learning Objective-C to be part of the whole native mobile development movement. What I didn’t know when getting into this was how much of a history lesson I would have to participate in to understand the background behind so many aspects of the language and the core frameworks.

• by mark_round on 12/22/24, 9:08 AM

  A tangent I know, but looking at those old screenshots really made me miss that era of OS X. The first versions of Aqua with pinstripes were a bit busy for my liking, but by the Mountain Lion time frame it was just lovely. Actual buttons! Soft gradients! Icons that had colour!

• by threeseed on 12/22/24, 9:48 AM

  Also the influence of WebObjects has been unappreciated.

  EOF was probably the first ORM and Direct To WS the first web-based no-code tool.

• by acka on 12/22/24, 8:58 AM

  > Along with analysis and debugging tools, Apple still gives away everything needed to build apps for the Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

  Very conveniently glossing over the fact that developers still have to pay an annual Apple Developer Program subscription fee in order to be able to distribute their apps. TANSTAAFL, as always.

• by shae on 12/22/24, 2:15 PM

  I remember seeing finder running on NeXT at a Halloween party at he Omni group in 1999. That was a cool experience.

• by andrewstuart on 12/22/24, 9:30 AM

  It surprised me that Steve Jobs would be so open to unix.

  I thought with his not invented here syndrome and desire to control everything and attraction to simplicity and graphical UI he would have hated unix.

  How did he come to love unix enough to build NextStep on it?

• by WillAdams on 12/22/24, 4:44 PM

  I just wish it would be more widely available.

  Anyone using GNUstep successfully?

• by pipeline_peak on 12/23/24, 5:13 AM

  “ We saw the invention of the fricking World Wide Web on NeXTSTEP”

  I can’t stand when people bring this up with such pride. Like the web couldn’t have came on SPARC or anything other than the glorious Steve Jobs cube.

• by vrodic on 12/22/24, 8:48 PM

  i kind of hate that OjectiveC killed ObjectPascal and that we don't have a mainstream modern kernel written in Pascal.