I was the Supercard specialist in testing at Silicon Beach years ago, still a test lead and business analyst now.
I use Cocoa when I can, but am still a beginner much of the time.
I think everyone wants Supercard to program with, a Supercard that compiles, Cocoa goes half way there.
But the problem was that Supercard was always too slow, or too far behind the curve, or too gangly with add-ons.
Supercard was NEVER slow it was always outrageously fast but because it was not marketed as a language and there were no standards for scripting promoted, bad scripts always ruled the benchmarks.
It was ALWAYS way behind the curve, mainly because the features were driven by user requests, and everyone involved had a high level perspective who did not trust projections of how big the web would be.
So in the end they threw in a bunch of web add-ons to fix what was missing, of-course that makes it look like a tone of work to use.
I always thought the way to make Supercard a huge hit was to turn it into a real language, one that compiles, but as usual those who listened to me didn't really listen.
My suggestion was actually to build Supercard with C++ objects that could be configured by a runtime so that any runtime that the users configured would compile. This way any popular C++ compiler could be recommended to compile with and the company would just sell the framework.
And the vision is that the user would just work in Supercard as usual but what they built would compile to an app using only the required objects and classes.
And C++ programmers could meddle with the guts if they wanted, to their hearts content.
Then sell this level as a language, take a low level to highly perspective when building new stuff into it.
My guess is that when it comes to programming tools Apple ships whatever their employees give them, and Cocoa is a bit undermanned so is generally late compared to the others, and they keep on using carbon because they have many programmers that don't know cocoa. Well, also probably Adobe has very few programmers that really want to use Cocoa so they are twisting Apple's arm to make more carbon !!!
Its also very difficult to think low level and high level at the same time or the high level comes after the low level and it often takes a long time to get there.
I believe that the unseen real power in computing is the layering of systems that occurs without work or design effort, simply through circumstance. Frameworks of high level languages that run as layers over low level languages, which are truly open to programmers will receive a LOT of external scrutiny and help for free, and make Apple programmers jobs very easy, because external programmers will send them examples of what they want.
Or a single code base framework that has many runtimes that run on top of code to create the facade of the high level language, could allow everyone to work together and at whatever level they want.
Its all intended to created a world where everyone can participate, or at least way back in the early days THAT was the power in computing and programming, wasn't it !?!?!?!
by Robert — Oct 08
I use Cocoa when I can, but am still a beginner much of the time.
I think everyone wants Supercard to program with, a Supercard that compiles, Cocoa goes half way there.
But the problem was that Supercard was always too slow, or too far behind the curve, or too gangly with add-ons.
Supercard was NEVER slow it was always outrageously fast but because it was not marketed as a language and there were no standards for scripting promoted, bad scripts always ruled the benchmarks.
It was ALWAYS way behind the curve, mainly because the features were driven by user requests, and everyone involved had a high level perspective who did not trust projections of how big the web would be.
So in the end they threw in a bunch of web add-ons to fix what was missing, of-course that makes it look like a tone of work to use.
I always thought the way to make Supercard a huge hit was to turn it into a real language, one that compiles, but as usual those who listened to me didn't really listen.
My suggestion was actually to build Supercard with C++ objects that could be configured by a runtime so that any runtime that the users configured would compile. This way any popular C++ compiler could be recommended to compile with and the company would just sell the framework.
And the vision is that the user would just work in Supercard as usual but what they built would compile to an app using only the required objects and classes.
And C++ programmers could meddle with the guts if they wanted, to their hearts content.
Then sell this level as a language, take a low level to highly perspective when building new stuff into it.
My guess is that when it comes to programming tools Apple ships whatever their employees give them, and Cocoa is a bit undermanned so is generally late compared to the others, and they keep on using carbon because they have many programmers that don't know cocoa. Well, also probably Adobe has very few programmers that really want to use Cocoa so they are twisting Apple's arm to make more carbon !!!
Its also very difficult to think low level and high level at the same time or the high level comes after the low level and it often takes a long time to get there.
I believe that the unseen real power in computing is the layering of systems that occurs without work or design effort, simply through circumstance. Frameworks of high level languages that run as layers over low level languages, which are truly open to programmers will receive a LOT of external scrutiny and help for free, and make Apple programmers jobs very easy, because external programmers will send them examples of what they want.
Or a single code base framework that has many runtimes that run on top of code to create the facade of the high level language, could allow everyone to work together and at whatever level they want.
Its all intended to created a world where everyone can participate, or at least way back in the early days THAT was the power in computing and programming, wasn't it !?!?!?!