In My World
You missed Objective-C with is a combo of SmallTalk and C which came about the same time as C++ or perhaps in answer to it. C# is that .NET thing from Microsoft and it’s being supported in the Open Source Mono syste (which is a clone of .NET). ObjC is used heavily on the Mac OS X operating syste (as well as C++ & Java) it’s roots are from NeXTStep OS. Mac OS X is basically the latest iteration of NeXTStep/OpenStep as Apple purchased NeXT. Looking at the API’s, they are full of NeXTStep (ns) references. Objective-C and the Cocoa API (NeXTStep) is really amazing, it’s a shame Apple killed yellowbox (a WinNT port of the API so you could run your apps under WindowsNT).
Steve Jobs started NeXT and Pixar when he was forced out of Apple by the stock holders and board of directors. The technology produced by NeXT was way way ahead of it’s time. I would have given my right leg to have gotten my hands on one of those black beauty NeXT cube back in the day! NeXT was very big in the finance world as their development environment was the most advanced Object based development environment available at the time. The ability to model data and link Objects to database rows and how that improved efficiency was it’s great strength in enterprise development. Ruby On Rails is now taking those concepts and bringing it to Web development. If you’ve ever done any PHP or Python/Zope development, take a good look at Ruby On Rails http://rubyonrails.com/ and yeah! It runs with Oracle!
Posted by MJS
09/21/2005 at 01:00 PM