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- Recommended by 4 people: 3 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2024.
- Made by the vendor. The company whose product it covers made or sponsored it.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
115K views14 years ago4 recommendations
Software designHistory and cultureObject-oriented designSoftware architectureDeveloper productivity
A 1991 promotional video stages a head-to-head programming contest comparing NeXTSTEP's object-oriented GUI builder against traditional Sun UNIX development.
In 1991 Steve Jobs' company commissioned an head-to-head programming competition to show how much faster and easier it was to program a NeXT computer vs a Sun workstation. The NeXT operating system went on to be the foundation for Apple's Macintosh OS-X about a decade later.Why it's here
4 people recommend this, 1 disputes itWhat people say. Recommended as a classic demonstration of the power of object-oriented programming and rapid application development tools.
indymikeon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)”
Started programming in 1982. Object oriented programming was a huge advance - especially in developer productivity. A side effect was the dramatic improvement in developer tools: gui builders, IDEs, etc all improved dramatically. Probably the watershed moment for OO was this NeXT video that showed the difference: link to this video
rileyphoneon Hacker News • Recommends
On “SwiftUI Is Convenient, but Slow”
There's a fun bit of marketing 0 NeXT did when AppKit was the new thing, comparing building a reasonably non-trivial application with it to a Sun workstation using C. Obviously biased, but still an interesting look into the development environment that among other things brought us the Web and DOOM. 0. link to this video
lprovenon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)”
…comparing the effectiveness of different languages. How long they take to attain a specified level of proficiency, how long to learn enough to produce working code, and importantly, readability: for instance, how long it takes to find intentionally-planted bugs in existing, unfamiliar code. NeXT did this, way back in the 1980s, and Sun lost badly: link to this video There is a writeup of some of it here: link But speaking as a non-video-liker, this 17min one is worth it.…
mistersquidon Hacker News • Disputes
On “NeXT vs. Sun (1991) [video]”
@12:19: link to this video > 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…
frikon Hacker News • Mentions
On “BeOS Demo Video (1998) [video]”
…t is out of print now he released it as PDF for free: link , link Check out HaikuOS, an open source BeOS reimplementation: link . And there were two BeOS inspired OS: ZETA-OS and SkyOS with some shady history: link , link Some of the BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP history is documented in Apple Copland OS article: link Another interesting video is: link to this video ( In 1991 Steve Jobs' company commissioned an head-to-head programming competition to show how much faster and easier it was to program a NeXT computer vs a Sun workstation. The NeXT operating system went on to be the foundation for Apple's Macintosh OS-X about a decade later. )…
pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions
On “An experience with Ubuntu Touch development”
Another good example is the NeXT vs Sun duel, regarding the RAD tooling of NeXTStep vs the traditional UNIX development (1991). link to this video
pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions
On “An experience with Ubuntu Touch development”
You mean like this in 1991? link to this video I would have rather used the GUI tooling of a NeXT, which eschews the UNIX traditions even though it builds partially on top of them, than the Solaris way of programming GUIs, if given the option. Just because I could only access green phosphor terminals, doesn't mean I wasn't aware of other, more expensive, options.
pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms”
> which is further evidence of the amazing foresight Apple had in basing macOS on an open-source core (BSD): NeXT did it, not Apple. And the goal of the time was just to help bring UNIX software into NeXTSTEP as they were competing against the likes of Solaris for market share. link to this video The whole NeXT architecture has very little UNIX on it. link link
pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Building a Command-Line Application with Crystal”
…o Pascal 6.0 programmer's guide. link For some 8 bit love you can check ZX Spectrum and Atari archives. link link Next step is to get an emulator for any of those old OS/computers and try to follow along one of those books. Also there are some videos on YouTube showing those systems. "The Smalltalk-80 Programming System" link "NeXT vs Sun" link to this video "Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3" link "Amiga Programming" link "Amiga Hardware Programming" link The Mother of All Demos" link Just a very tiny sample of videos…
pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions
On “MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?”
…was used for its Objective-C tooling and frameworks, like Renderman and Improv. The UNIX stuff was just a solution for having a quick ramp up for their OS development, and just like Microsoft with Windows 3.1 NT, to have a tick in the box when selling to the government, Their famous commercial against Sun, hardly touches on UNIX like development. link to this video You aren't going to see a CLI on that NeXTSTEP screen. Just like the SDK is all about Objective-C related stuff, even the device drivers were written in Objective-C. link The only fouls here are those that keep giving their money to corporations instead of supporting Linux OEMs, as Microsoft cleverly discovered. In fact, had either A/UX n…
pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Nova by Panic”
…g that requires live experience, You can start by having a look at, link "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" link "SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985" link You can see how NeXT builds on many of these concepts on the famous "NeXT vs Sun" marketing piece, link to this video Sun also had some ideas along these lines with NeWS, "NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System," link Naturally OS/2, BeOS, Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Android share some of the ideas. Now, before I proceed note that actually modern Linux distributions have all the tooling to make these concepts happen, but it fails short to have…
pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions
On “ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook: A SIMD Benchmark”
…down to driver kit. As Application developer on a NeXT, the tune was all about WebObjects, Renderman, EOF. Applications like Lotus Improv, Wingz, and those being put out by Omni Group were the meat of the kind of applications that people considered to use NeXTSTEP, not BSD command line utilities. Pretty much patent on commercials like NeXT vs Sun. link to this video Or Steve Jobs opinion on UNIX users, link and later when back at Apple link AIX is definitly UNIX, because it isnt' like A/UX, NeXTSTEP, OS X or iOS, where the UNIX layer is there more to bring stuff into the platform, while the main developer stack is something else.…
pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions
On “VisualAge for Java 1.0 – Let the Future Begin (1997)”
Just like the Web supports responsive design and not everyone actually uses it. For Motif I am aware of the one provided with Motif++, now gone from the Web, and the one provided by ICS ( link ). I guess Solaris might have lacked one indeed, given NeXT's commercial. link to this video Sun was never good at desktop software anyway, killed NeWS, Swing while powerful requires graphics programming knowledge to make cool UIs and then there was F3 (JavaFX 1.0), and the Java Desktop Framework Integration project went nowhere.
rileyphoneon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Byte Magazine Special Issue: Smalltalk (1984)”
…a wonderfully pragmatic approach to OOP, though it remained tied to the systems it was on because of the standard object libraries that enabled it. NeXT promotional materials really liked to showcase its suitedness to rapid application development, whether Jobs himself doing so 1 or in a staged competition with Sun 2 0 link 1 link 2 link to this video…
sedatkon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Rust vs Zig Benchmarks”
We should have developer benchmarks for programming languages such as "time to first successful compile", "time to first running copy", "time to find the root cause of a certain bug". Similar to that Sun vs NeXT competition back in the day: link to this video Maybe platforms like Leetcode and HackerRank can publish such statistics. I'd find such benchmarks way more interesting than comparisons of milliseconds for solutions to some arbitrary algorithms that we'll never use in real life. I'm not saying they aren't useful, but they aren't interesting.