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Comment on "Getting Answers on Cocoa Mailing Lists"
by Scott Stevenson — Nov 22
Justin said: feel some sort of entitlement to be abrasive and rude when they have to deal with newbies. Lest they forget they were once in that state too.

I agree, but both sides need to bend a little to meet in the middle.

Uli said: Scott, one thing you may want to mention is that it also helps to write English

This is true, but I didn't talk about it here because I think it's a larger issue. Maybe it's worth a mention, though.

Dan said: I've used the list on and off when I was *really* stuck but I've never found it all that convienient, which is perhaps the intention?

To some degree, I think there are some natural barriers in place. The list wouldn't function if it was a first line of defense. The traffic is already too high.

George said: if Apple gave us the Cocoa source, most of my questions I would be able to answer myself

As someone recently pointed out on cocoa-dev, this isn't nearly as practical as it may sound on the surface. Cocoa doesn't magically hover atop the rest of the system. It almost certainly digs into parts of Mac OS X which aren't intended to be exposed.

Not to mention the fact that Apple is trying to build value in the platform. They've invested a lot of time in effort in Cocoa. These investments only take place if there's an expectation that it will pay off in apps unique to Mac OS X, and if said apps drive adoption of new versions of Mac OS X. Core Data is as much a feature of Cocoa as Dashboard is because developers write apps using new API. The customers, in term, buy Tiger to use a new Core Data-enabled app. Open sourcing Cocoa would rip out a key component of this chain.

All of that said, most (all?) of CoreFoundation is open source, so you can see how things like NSArray, NSDictionary and other Foundation classeswork. I think that's a very reasonable compromise.

Nat said: My peeve in queries like this is the word "work" -- any permutation of "didn't work", "stopped working", "how can I get it to work", etc.

Amen, brother.
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