I am still in awe of NeXT's software technology, generally. It was just so carefully and intentionally designed as a coherent whole; one would hope this was where we were going as we got better at architecting software (as individuals, as a field), but disappointingly in retrospect it appears as a kind of high-point, after which we continued to descend into ball-and-twine mediocrity. For Reasons economic and and social that I think people could argue about a lot, but we don't because in part because as a field we don't seem to even agree on what excellence in software architecture/design even means anymore.
But what I want to talk about instead is:
> Like EOF, our database layer that still puts Ruby-on-Rails to shame.
I spent a couple years programming with EOF (the "Enteprise Object Framework", an ORM), and many more recent years programming with ActiveRecord. EOF had a few features that ActiveRecord still doesn't that I miss (like properly functioning multi-table inheritance; and lazy "eager loading" triggered on first access for all associations; Rails 6.1 has a welcome feature to RAISE on n+1 behavior, but why not just lazily trigger the efficient load instead, which is probably no harder to implement? Maybe nobody thought of it, having not used EOF?).
But I wouldn't actually say it still puts ActiveRecord "to shame". ActiveRecord is very similar to EOF in design, by 2020 nearly as mature, with 80-90% of the features.
Yeah, it's striking that ~20 years later we can say AR is mostly as good as EOF haha (and doesn't have anything of note that EOF didn't already have, it hasnt' superceded it in any ways). It's internal architecture isn't quite as elegant. But it really is nearly as good as EOF, it's deficiencies compared to EOF aren't large enough to be particularly shameful, in my experience/opinion, it's in the ballpark!
AR is so similar to EOF that I have always wondered if some of it's designers had experience with EOF.
As a former NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) who started a company that did custom NeXT development, I both strongly agree and strongly disagree.
The technology really was great. Their understanding of object orientation was superior. The developer tools were wonderful. The user experience was generally a delight. We could develop custom software in a fraction of the time of people using the tools of the day. NeXT had a true vision of the future.
However, what they didn't have was much understanding of economics. The only reason that NeXT wasn't a complete commercial failure was that Apple's board wanted Steve Jobs back. If not, Apple might instead have bought out Be. And if Apple had succeeded in developing their own next-gen OS, both NeXT and Be might be minor footnotes these days. Even prior to the deus ex machina buyout, NeXT was on a slow and steady path to failure. They'd gone from an integrated hardware vendor to an OS-on-other-hardware vendor to a dev-tools-on-other-OSes vendor, and it's not clear that would have worked either. Once the acquisition was announced, they promised to take care of the people who had stuck with them and then did jack.
I took a few lessons away from my time with NeXT. 1) Just because I thought something was technically superior didn't mean it was commercially viable. 2) Being too far ahead of the market is worse than being behind it. 3) Never trust a "visionary leader" to look out for you, no matter what he says. He's in it for himself and the vision; the little people are expendable.
But you're definitely right that it made using other stuff painful. I stopped doing GUI development altogether rather than shift to Windows, which was incomparably awful by comparison.
NeXT was also mostly ahead of the market on the software side. Their machines were a very tough sell compared to the price and performance of other UNIX workstations of the time (which is why I know SunOS and not NeXTStep).
All the vision and all the software quality in the world won't make you competitive in the 90s UNIX workstation market if your machines are underpowered, and we were used to garbage software anyway. Chasing the "personal workstation"/PC market also would never work. DOS/Windows was far too strong and the Macintosh deep in a niche. It's very unfortunate.
Thanks for sharing. Can you elaborate a bit why GUI development for NeXT was (and probably is) superior comparing to Windows GUI development (even if we include Borland's effort).
Personal experience: Around 2005 I was looking for a platform for a new web app, after some years out of development but having worked extensively with NeXTstep and EOF in the 90s.
After watching DHH's video and reading the Rails book, it reminded me so much of my previous experience with NeXT technology that I had no other choice but to go with Rails.
The dynamism of Ruby had a lot in common with ObjC's runtime. And reading about ActiveRecord at that time I also had the feeling that its authors had worked with EOF before.
All in all, NeXT built great stuff. I still own a NeXTstation Color that I got in 1992 (one of these days I should try to turn it on again). And it's a testament to the quality of that software that some pieces that I'm still running today, like Apple Mail, trace back almost directly to tools I started using back then (NeXTMail).
Yep, people don't often comment on how similar ruby and ObjC are, in fundamentals.
I think it's because both of them were so influenced by smalltalk, more than ObjC influencing ruby necessarily. But not sure.
But I'm still very curious if AR's creators knew EOF, yeah. I haven't found DHH mentioning it; not sure if there might be forgotten other person/people central to original AR architecture.
WebObjects itself was nice in many many ways (I think it's encapsulation of form handling is far better than anything anyone's managed in Rails)... but made a fundamental mistake in trying to keep a fundamentally stateful architecture and apply it to the web by putting what was effectively an opaque state ID in every single URL. This was a basically bad design for the web (although also provided for forementioned good encapsulation of form handling. :) ).
But yeah, the sense I get in my career is that we spend a lot of time trying to reinvent something that already existed, and getting close to being as good as it... then collectively moving on to the next language/platform and doing it again. With not a lot of progress. Up to and through the 90s, it seemed like there was actual progress in software design and architecture at the high-level, the level of affordances for developers to efficiently create reliable maintainable software, but it seems to me have stalled -- perhaps in favor of huge advances in more low-level stuff, better/different languages/language paradigms, etc.
> I am still in awe of NeXT's software technology, generally. It was just so carefully and intentionally designed as a coherent whole [...]
The closest I got to experience inner workings of NeXT software is observing the boot log of Mac OS (which you can see if you boot it with Qemu/Clover). I haven't seen so many triple exclamation marks in a while. That somehow didn't leave the impression of carefully and intentionally designed software.
I couldn't say how similar a 2020 MacOS bootlog is at this point to anything that was in NeXT, and wouldn't assume that whatever you're seeing now that you find inelegant was there in NeXTStep 20 years ago or longer. I mean, maybe, but I wouldn't just assume it and judge NeXT for it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In any event, the boot log is not something I had occasion to pay attention to in NeXTStep, I couldn't speak to it.
NeXTStep/OpenStep had a great development environment and was full of innovation but even in the '90s it had old BSD components that were rarely updated and it really wasn't a great unix. Mac OS X has followed that pattern. Also Mach was inherently slow so running OpenStep on x86 hardware was slower than Linux or Windows - in Mac OS X they finally gave up on a pure microkernel and flattened the kernel to reduce the overhead of message passing through the BSD personality layer to Mach. But folks running OpenStep were running it for the RAD development tools and EOF that let you quickly design a UI with a very usable ORM that allowed you to take a desktop app and turn it into a webapp via WebObjects seamlessly. They complained about the *nix layer even then, but the unix layer was adequate and you could compile newer versions of tools you needed then as now.
And I'm upset I didn't get an opportunity to properly work with WebObjects. WebObjects with Swift would revolutionize the web - IMHO - it was gone too soon.
I coded fulltime in WebObjects from 2006-2008 making webApps in the health care industry.
During my Software Engineering degree I learned the difference between a Library and a Framework, but it wasn't until actually using the WebObjects Framework that the light bulb went off in my head. It was a pleasure to work with, and clearly very, VERY well thought out.
EOF was great, and every time I made a new NSArray() it brought a smile to my face.
It would hardly do that, in case you aren't aware they were in the genesis of J2EE.
> Since the transition of WebObjects to Java in 2000, the functionality of many of Apple's Java Foundation classes is replicated in Sun's own JDK. However, they persist largely for reasons of backwards-compatibility and developers are free to use whichever frameworks they prefer.
When I was an intern at Apple, I somehow finagled my way into some long-time manager’s backyard cookout. A lot of Apple old-timers were there, including Blaine. Really neat guy and a great raconteur. That’s when I realized engineers of that era were cut from a different cloth.
Yep, you really needed to know the intimate inner workings of the CPU and each digital chip from the keyboard input to the display output to produce code that would make a quality product.
It took years of experience that you could only gain through hands-on work, to know how to debug hardware that's why gray-beards are so valued in hardware vs in software where people talk of ageism.
When your hardware/low level software doesn't perform as expected you can't google/stack overflow yourself out of the problem, you need to grab the datasheets, the schematics, an oscilloscope, a soldering iron, hunch over patiently and devise a way to debug the issue out as no one else can help you.
Hardware engineering is now just as challenging as it was back then but due to the commodization of hardware along with the rise of China and the downfall of high-tech giants like IBM, Philips, Siemens, Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry, Nortel, Ericsson, etc most hardware jobs disappeared or moved overseas and pay went significantly downhill compared to software engineering(at least in Europe).
Maybe we met there too? Honestly, one of the top 5 parties I've ever been to in my entire life in terms of intellectual firepower. I hope I get to go again someday.
One of my first experiences with Unix was getting an angry email from Steve Jobs.
He had a default message in the NeXT mail client back in the early '90's. I for some reason felt it was a good idea to send him an email and enable 'return receipt'. He replied, fuming at the violation of his privacy and never answered my question.
That is perfectly, perfectly believable. He was never interested in being accountable to others. As Steve Wozniak said, "He had very, very, very negative sides and he didn't seem to care what other people felt."
I love reading stories about Steve Jobs at NeXT. He had been fired from Apple and wasn't on the winning team but he was still fighting to build great products. I know he's a controversial figure but he did great things.
Personally I find that Steve at NeXT is far more relatable than post iPhone Steve.
Heard a lot of story and this about him talk to the story guy about his wife passing away. Can’t imagine it happened in Steve I. It is cruel to say the best thing happen to Beethoven is his deaf. And Steve his being fired. But life service you lemon and sometimes it is the good thing. Less arrogance as he was quoted to say.
Wow, 81 comments and not one mention yet of the NeXTcube. That perfect 305mm x 305mm x 305mm (1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot) magnesium cube was hell to produce, but gorgeous to look at. And, it was the machine that the original web server ran on at CERN. [0]
I've kind of always wanted one of them, but I've also kind of wondered if I'd be disappointed by it, if I got one. After all, it only ran at 25mhz.
What I'd really like to do is get an empty case and put a modern PC inside it. That would be awesome. You'd probably have to gut the case and put in new mounting hardware, but a mini-ATX or micro-ATX board would definitely fit in there. There should be room for drive rails and a PSU, but I wonder if ventilation would be a problem.
Perhaps the most fitting thing to stuff in there would be a Mac, or, maybe, a Hackintosh.
I’m not a fan of taking old computers and “harvesting“ their cases. People used to do this a lot with the original Macintosh models. Often they would turn them into aquariums. Now all those computers are collectors’ items, and many of them have been butchered. The original NeXT computers are much more rare than those Macintoshes. In my opinion they deserve to be preserved for history.
That's a good thought. I wonder if such a case mod as I propose could be done non-destructively. That is, if you were done with the modern PC inside, could you easily re-convert it back to a NeXTcube? I have no real idea, since I've never seen inside of one. :/
I worked in academia, and there were a few old NeXT machines around. I said, I'll collect these! None of them worked, but I figured my little office had enough space to give them a new home. A few other people had them, saw I was keen, and gave me theirs. I ended up with a cube and two slabs. Never got them to work.
Found out that another colleague had a few of them in a storage closet, and had aspirations of cobbling them together to make a working one. I gave him the machines.
He went on vacation, someone cleared out the closet, and fucking recycled them all. When he came back he was livid. I still feel the loss.
Software guy going hardware here, throwing down on machining hardware here in China next week. Funnily enough, I actually saw magnesium being machined for the first time on Monday: a part for a medical device. The machinist said it requires different coolant (white in his case) but sources online say you can go dry as well. You also need different fire suppression systems in order to safely machine it, as the chips may burn from friction on blunt tools or excessive feed rates. I wondered why bother, so I just looked it up, assuming in the NeXTcube case it was aesthetics. It does not match aluminium in terms of its thermal conductivity, but allegedly may be one-third lighter, more dent-resistant, more easily machinable, and better able to shield electromagnetic radiation and dampen vibrations. Seems a lot to pay for some nominal benefits unless specialist applications demand it. PS. Never saw a NeXTcube except in a museum maybe, but earned some of my first Unix software money programming embedded cryptographic applications for the abortive Cobalt Qube and Raq ecosystem, incidentally the only MIPS target I've ever written for, but no doubt NeXTcube-inspired.
I dunno, just seems fetishistic & insular. Physical product design is not why I personally got into computers. Quite the opposite, the liberation of feeling like you had joined a plane of of thoughts & ideas, decoupled yourself from the material. Apple still kicks out ultrapowered trash cans & cheese graters, & while sometimes the density is impressive, the showmanship of it has always been off-putting & encouraging bad-think to me, takes away g distracts from far more important realities.
This seems kind of pedantic, since the "NeXT Computer" and the "Cube" where both cubes. They needed to change the name after the slab (NeXTstation) was released.
Would Steve Jobs’ have been tolerated these days, in a post #MeToo era?
Now, I am definitely not accusing him of sexual harassment. But hand-in-hand with that, the culture seems to have shifted towards pressuring bosses of public companies and organizations to be less abusive in a range of domains. Would his behavior as been as tolerated or celebrated if he was still around today?
These people still exist. They run some of the major tech companies that produce products tech people love.
The difference is that top engineers have more options these days. They can choose to move into a high paying job at Google or Facebook where they don't have to deal with abusive relationships with the CEO.
Instead, companies with abusive CEOs attract people with high ambitions who don't yet have the skills and resume to walk into an easier, high-paying job. The CEO (ab)uses the ambitious, early-career people to extract as much work as possible before they burn out. The employees use the grind to level up their skills and resume to pivot into a better job later.
I worked for one such company early in my career. Turnover was high. It was basically a pipeline that either led to burnout or a cushy, high-paying job elsewhere if you could survive the abuse long enough to get an impressive resume out of it.
The catch is that none of us wanted to talk about how terrible the working environment was, because it would only devalue those lines on our resume. So instead we kept quiet and let everyone assume the famous tech company and CEO we worked for were actually amazing places to work. Anything else would be self-sabotage. It's a strange cycle.
I have a good friend who worked there during the 90s and wrote a shitload of the backend ordering system. She went on to work at Google as Director of Site Reliability Engineering.
Abusive/abrasive bosses are still celebrated today. Jeff Bezos runs a company where employees urinate in bottles because they aren't given time for a bathroom break and asks employees in meetings "why are you wasting my life". Tim Bray has some stories to tell about AWS too. Elon Musk abuses his employees, his shareholders, his companies, and everyone else on Twitter nearly every time he opens his mouth. It's almost cheating to mention Elizabeth Holmes. Same with Travis Kalanick.
I think Jobs would be thought of exactly the same if he were around and in his prime today: a very controversial figure who produces amazing work but has his fair share of detractors for a number of reasons. Remember, Steve's behavior was barely tolerated by a large number of people. He was hated by many, loved by many, merely tolerated by most.
It is interesting to note though that despite all his faults Jobs had very long, sometimes decades long, extremely fruitful work relationships. Woz, Andy Herztfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Avie Tevanian, Bertrand Serlet, Phil Schiller, Jony Ive... etc. And at Pixar too. Such high caliber people wouldn't stay around if it was so terrible or there was no redeeming quality.
The linked post by Blaine Garst is _glowing_ proudly of having worked with Steve Jobs and the all star team he assembled. Quote: "great minds collaborating and challenging each other to succeed. With the best CEO on the planet."
The "challenging each other" maybe the important point. If you are a normal dude it is easy being intimidated by a big ego. But if you are an A-player you can hold your ground?
Maybe it was even the case that engineers, who are focused on objective technical details/goals and having a thick skin, dealt best with Jobs?
He did mellow with age, though. The Steve Jobs biography actually latched onto this as a key narrative element—a way to construct Jobs's personal arch—and I do believe it's genuine based on everything else I've read about the guy.
And it's notable that Jobs only really reached his zenith in these later years. The original Macintosh had a splashy launch, but sales began dwindling pretty quickly[1], and NeXT never had much commercial success before Apple bought them. My admiration of Jobs is really for the person he was in his last decade. He was a visionary long before that, of course, but ideas are relatively cheap, and Jobs couldn't execute.
Jobs was, to be sure, certainly still a demanding figure at the end of his life (and I would not have wanted to work for him), but I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have him beat.
Even ignoring the specific movement, hopefully we all pressure our bosses to be less abusive (no abuse is acceptable).
I could never work for Steve Jobs because I wouldn’t have put up with his ridiculous behavior and would have walked.
Part of the situation that lead to the MeToo movement was power, and Steve Jobs had a lot of power over people who worked for him.
This was something I knew since starting my career, and worked for the last ten years to make sure no one (other than governments) has so much power over me that I have to listen to them.
Isn't part of it that Steve was able to sell people on his vision though? So it's not just that he had power in the way that a judge has power or a school principal has power— those are powerful figures that you submit to because the alternative is punishment. Rather, he had power in the way that a beloved family member has power. People wanted to please him because they had bought into what the vision was and how their piece of the puzzle fit into making it a reality.
Was there abusive stuff going on there? Absolutely! And there's almost certainly some overlap here with other cases (actress submits to famous film executive because it's part of his "creative process"), but I don't know if the current/recent reckoning would do much to prevent a small, dedicated technical team from overworking themselves and tolerating abusive management practices in service of a new charismatic, visionary leader like Jobs apparently was.
> Would his behavior as been as tolerated or celebrated if he was still around today?
Not sure I've seen many (any?) instances of his abusive behavior being celebrated in my 30 years of following him. Certainly some awe over how scary he was.
I've often thought it amazing that he was as successful as he was despite his terrible behavior.
His golden aura would have been dented for sure. Like a lot of abusive people, he did very well when he could control the flow of information. But social media is undermining that.
However, I think it depends a lot on where in his career arc this transition happened. If he had been caught out early on, it could well have kept him from rising. Imagine the Twitter furor if a rising exec got caught cheating his business partner, for example. [1] Of course, it could have gone the other way; his conscious manipulation of his image [2] could have led him to be less abusive, or at least better at concealing it.
But if it came later, once he was head of Apple, I doubt it would have mattered much. He was already notoriously an asshole. [3] People will accept a lot as long as the money keeps rolling in and the asshole seems irreplaceable.
#MeToo concerns sexual abuse in the workplace. I'm not sure why you thought it was necessary to cite that as your milestone marker, and then back out to talking about abuse in general.
#MeToo also had that disturbing element of liberal, feminist icons being the sexual abusers all along. (Harvey Weinstein)
I think the parent is using #MeToo as a catch-all for intolerance of any alleged abuse of power and cancel culture in general. And as others have mentioned Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are doing fine, so no Steve Jobs would have probably been fine in the current time.
There definitely would have been pressure to change. I highly doubt he would ever have been cancelled, though. Nothing he did ever rose to anywhere near that kind of level, except for possibly aspects of his family life. Jobs was brilliant product guy, but verbal abuse never helps teams become more productive. All that he did was in spite of his temper.
I would, uh, say Musk is not doing fine. Among other things, he got his company investigated by the FCC for basically no reason at all. Jobs had his moments but when he went crazy, he didn't go nearly as crazy as Musk, at least not in public.
To be fair, Jobs also didn't have a Twitter account. I don't know why, but that seems to do weird things to people.
Pavel Durov tho... he's visionary but his expectations became too unrealistic lately. I wonder what happens to Telegram now that the SEC stopped that ICO.
The real question isn't if he could have lasted or had to adapt. The real question is if the next Steve Jobs will be able to do the things the old one did, while avoiding post-progressive pitfalls.
>> One thing that was unusual is that all the technical people there understood all aspects of the machine. Software people could talk about ASICs and CPU instructions, and the hardware people understood the software stack. Every aspect of what it takes to make a computer work was represented in one building: analog hardware, chip design, motherboard design, compiler design (objective C), loader, operating system, windowing system, application layer, and applications. Where other companies had engineering teams, NeXT would have a single individual.
This is in stark contrast to most of today's companies, where you have front-end engineers who don't know anything about the backend they are interacting with, backend engineers who don't care about the frontend they are serving data to, database engineers who care about neither, etc.
And that's just software. The hardware might as well be a black box for the vast majority of software engineers working at your average software company today.
Do you think that engineers designing the plumbing system of the F1 rocket engine knew pretty much anything about "compiler design" or "motherboard design"?
What you are in fact observing is a human system's tendency to adapt to growing complexity. Human systems adapt to growing complexity by specializing it's members to particular skills (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_specialization).
It's just a fact that way back then in the NeXT days, the computer was not as complex, the understanding of which was just about achievable by 1 human. Eventually, that metric exceeds 1.
For the case of the first apple computer, it was ~1 (Wozniak), in the case of Apollo, it was >100.
Cognitive Specialization is an aspect of all living things, but is very apparent in the Human species. Computers got more complex in just the same fashion as how farming went from a farmer, a bull, and a blacksmith, to gigantic conglomerates to make the fertilizer, tractors, watering system, etc., that comprise of >10,000 humans.
Partly ad tech. It changed the reward profile away from inventing cool new stuff towards lowest-common-denominator monetisation.
The real change was the change in the culture of computer use from original creation to consumption and distribution of certain limited kinds of creation - which are mostly imitative, nostalgic, and either backwards- or (at best) sideways-looking rather than genuinely original.
Real invention is now actively disfavoured. Google did a fair amount in the 00s but has slowly abandoned most of it, Amazon does a bit of blue sky but is mostly focussed on consumerism, Musk's idea of blue sky is straight out of a 1950s Tom Swift novel, and Facebook and Twitter are both hopeless. Netflix is cable TV done right - finally. But it's still cable TV.
There are some exceptions at Apple, which still has a kind of legacy tradition of doing cool new stuff (see also, M1) but even that is a mix of invention for the sake of it and strategic lock-in as a goal.
The result is a landscape full of development geared to comfortable suburban consumerism and associated corporate bureaucracy. There's very little interest in game changing technical development for the sake of it - which was more or less what NeXT was about. And there's even less interest in computing as subversion and empowerment, which was - believe it or not - a big interest in the 70s.
FOSS doesn't change this. (It likes to believe it does, but practically it really doesn't.)
Quantum computing and AI may be on the cusp - but even if they do something interesting they're going to be coopted by ad tech as soon as the paint dries.
So it's not about technical scope so much as imagination failure. The real loss is the loss of imagination - something that tech and media have both done a lot of damage to over the last couple of decades.
I don't think we did; there's a bit of selection bias at play for NeXT where they had a large network of stars to choose from and a reputation that would attract a large pool of other people worth choosing. It's just that a lot more people are involved in the industry now so there's a lot more entry-level/ grunt work to be had.
I think part of the problem is you comparing to a fairly different industry. Companies that employ "Front End" and "Back end" engineers are very different than NeXT, which had products from asic to high level.
If you work at a hardware company, even in a role that's very far from hardware, you become aware of this stuff because it effects you. Even if you don't understand ASIC at all, you still know about, oh, such and such process node has this issue, because it impacted our schedule and somebody told me about it at a lunch table. And you may not even know how to solder, but you can say, oh this needs rework, 0 ohm resistor at point such and such to make the display work, because you need to know it to go to the lab and have the work done.
Really the thing I understood the least working at a company like that was actual productization. You hear about something you worked on a year and a half ago being a tablet, or an embedded device, and you'd be like, oh, that old thing is just being released now? And it's in that form factor? huh.
By getting it right, which saw an explosion in the market, leaving us in a position now where there is more work to be done than the people who understand systems from top to bottom can handle alone. If those pioneering efforts had failed, the tech industry would now be insignificant and those superstars would be struggling to find work, never mind those who have a lesser understanding/care.
> NeXT was like graduate school, bringing together a high concentration of some of the brightest and most innovative technical minds
This line really interests me. As someone graduating pretty soon - are there tech companies out there that that still have this culture? Everything seems marketing / product focused today. Besides going to graduate school, does anyone here feel like they are at a company like this?
I think within big tech companies (Google/Apple/MS/etc.) you can find teams that have this kind of culture. IMO any team that does serious system programming (Compilers/OS/Libraries/etc.) should have it.
Chatting with national lab folks gave me a feel like this. Especially LANL.
I suppose Bell Labs might feel the same. I have a prof who goes to work there on summers occasionally taking a couple undergrads with him. He is one of the best teachers.
Yes, research labs like CERN have that culture. Startups, particularly those sharing incubator space, are often friendly. (I'm at a startup now, and we play table football every lunchtime).
Readit News
But what I want to talk about instead is:
> Like EOF, our database layer that still puts Ruby-on-Rails to shame.
I spent a couple years programming with EOF (the "Enteprise Object Framework", an ORM), and many more recent years programming with ActiveRecord. EOF had a few features that ActiveRecord still doesn't that I miss (like properly functioning multi-table inheritance; and lazy "eager loading" triggered on first access for all associations; Rails 6.1 has a welcome feature to RAISE on n+1 behavior, but why not just lazily trigger the efficient load instead, which is probably no harder to implement? Maybe nobody thought of it, having not used EOF?).
But I wouldn't actually say it still puts ActiveRecord "to shame". ActiveRecord is very similar to EOF in design, by 2020 nearly as mature, with 80-90% of the features.
Yeah, it's striking that ~20 years later we can say AR is mostly as good as EOF haha (and doesn't have anything of note that EOF didn't already have, it hasnt' superceded it in any ways). It's internal architecture isn't quite as elegant. But it really is nearly as good as EOF, it's deficiencies compared to EOF aren't large enough to be particularly shameful, in my experience/opinion, it's in the ballpark!
AR is so similar to EOF that I have always wondered if some of it's designers had experience with EOF.
The technology really was great. Their understanding of object orientation was superior. The developer tools were wonderful. The user experience was generally a delight. We could develop custom software in a fraction of the time of people using the tools of the day. NeXT had a true vision of the future.
However, what they didn't have was much understanding of economics. The only reason that NeXT wasn't a complete commercial failure was that Apple's board wanted Steve Jobs back. If not, Apple might instead have bought out Be. And if Apple had succeeded in developing their own next-gen OS, both NeXT and Be might be minor footnotes these days. Even prior to the deus ex machina buyout, NeXT was on a slow and steady path to failure. They'd gone from an integrated hardware vendor to an OS-on-other-hardware vendor to a dev-tools-on-other-OSes vendor, and it's not clear that would have worked either. Once the acquisition was announced, they promised to take care of the people who had stuck with them and then did jack.
I took a few lessons away from my time with NeXT. 1) Just because I thought something was technically superior didn't mean it was commercially viable. 2) Being too far ahead of the market is worse than being behind it. 3) Never trust a "visionary leader" to look out for you, no matter what he says. He's in it for himself and the vision; the little people are expendable.
But you're definitely right that it made using other stuff painful. I stopped doing GUI development altogether rather than shift to Windows, which was incomparably awful by comparison.
Thanks for sharing though!
I suppose it may be that technical excellence has never been economically viable, and NeXT survived as long as it did only by fluke.
All the vision and all the software quality in the world won't make you competitive in the 90s UNIX workstation market if your machines are underpowered, and we were used to garbage software anyway. Chasing the "personal workstation"/PC market also would never work. DOS/Windows was far too strong and the Macintosh deep in a niche. It's very unfortunate.
After watching DHH's video and reading the Rails book, it reminded me so much of my previous experience with NeXT technology that I had no other choice but to go with Rails.
The dynamism of Ruby had a lot in common with ObjC's runtime. And reading about ActiveRecord at that time I also had the feeling that its authors had worked with EOF before.
All in all, NeXT built great stuff. I still own a NeXTstation Color that I got in 1992 (one of these days I should try to turn it on again). And it's a testament to the quality of that software that some pieces that I'm still running today, like Apple Mail, trace back almost directly to tools I started using back then (NeXTMail).
I think it's because both of them were so influenced by smalltalk, more than ObjC influencing ruby necessarily. But not sure.
But I'm still very curious if AR's creators knew EOF, yeah. I haven't found DHH mentioning it; not sure if there might be forgotten other person/people central to original AR architecture.
WebObjects itself was nice in many many ways (I think it's encapsulation of form handling is far better than anything anyone's managed in Rails)... but made a fundamental mistake in trying to keep a fundamentally stateful architecture and apply it to the web by putting what was effectively an opaque state ID in every single URL. This was a basically bad design for the web (although also provided for forementioned good encapsulation of form handling. :) ).
But yeah, the sense I get in my career is that we spend a lot of time trying to reinvent something that already existed, and getting close to being as good as it... then collectively moving on to the next language/platform and doing it again. With not a lot of progress. Up to and through the 90s, it seemed like there was actual progress in software design and architecture at the high-level, the level of affordances for developers to efficiently create reliable maintainable software, but it seems to me have stalled -- perhaps in favor of huge advances in more low-level stuff, better/different languages/language paradigms, etc.
The closest I got to experience inner workings of NeXT software is observing the boot log of Mac OS (which you can see if you boot it with Qemu/Clover). I haven't seen so many triple exclamation marks in a while. That somehow didn't leave the impression of carefully and intentionally designed software.
In any event, the boot log is not something I had occasion to pay attention to in NeXTStep, I couldn't speak to it.
During my Software Engineering degree I learned the difference between a Library and a Framework, but it wasn't until actually using the WebObjects Framework that the light bulb went off in my head. It was a pleasure to work with, and clearly very, VERY well thought out.
EOF was great, and every time I made a new NSArray() it brought a smile to my face.
> Since the transition of WebObjects to Java in 2000, the functionality of many of Apple's Java Foundation classes is replicated in Sun's own JDK. However, they persist largely for reasons of backwards-compatibility and developers are free to use whichever frameworks they prefer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects#Java_compatibility
Doesn't stop tons of people from hating it :)
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If it is Entity Framework Core, then what swayed you about it over other ORM's you experienced?
It took years of experience that you could only gain through hands-on work, to know how to debug hardware that's why gray-beards are so valued in hardware vs in software where people talk of ageism.
When your hardware/low level software doesn't perform as expected you can't google/stack overflow yourself out of the problem, you need to grab the datasheets, the schematics, an oscilloscope, a soldering iron, hunch over patiently and devise a way to debug the issue out as no one else can help you.
Hardware engineering is now just as challenging as it was back then but due to the commodization of hardware along with the rise of China and the downfall of high-tech giants like IBM, Philips, Siemens, Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry, Nortel, Ericsson, etc most hardware jobs disappeared or moved overseas and pay went significantly downhill compared to software engineering(at least in Europe).
Majority of software engineering courses doesn’t really teach you how to be an engineer. It’s much closer to trade school than proper engineering.
He had a default message in the NeXT mail client back in the early '90's. I for some reason felt it was a good idea to send him an email and enable 'return receipt'. He replied, fuming at the violation of his privacy and never answered my question.
Edit: The internet never forgets, the default email in question - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCPlGgA6tE4
Personally I find that Steve at NeXT is far more relatable than post iPhone Steve.
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I've kind of always wanted one of them, but I've also kind of wondered if I'd be disappointed by it, if I got one. After all, it only ran at 25mhz.
What I'd really like to do is get an empty case and put a modern PC inside it. That would be awesome. You'd probably have to gut the case and put in new mounting hardware, but a mini-ATX or micro-ATX board would definitely fit in there. There should be room for drive rails and a PSU, but I wonder if ventilation would be a problem.
Perhaps the most fitting thing to stuff in there would be a Mac, or, maybe, a Hackintosh.
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[0]: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/original-next-comput...
Found out that another colleague had a few of them in a storage closet, and had aspirations of cobbling them together to make a working one. I gave him the machines.
He went on vacation, someone cleared out the closet, and fucking recycled them all. When he came back he was livid. I still feel the loss.
cube: 305 mm x 305 mm x 315 mm
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co82323...
Now, I am definitely not accusing him of sexual harassment. But hand-in-hand with that, the culture seems to have shifted towards pressuring bosses of public companies and organizations to be less abusive in a range of domains. Would his behavior as been as tolerated or celebrated if he was still around today?
(Assuming he didn’t mellow or adapt with age.)
The difference is that top engineers have more options these days. They can choose to move into a high paying job at Google or Facebook where they don't have to deal with abusive relationships with the CEO.
Instead, companies with abusive CEOs attract people with high ambitions who don't yet have the skills and resume to walk into an easier, high-paying job. The CEO (ab)uses the ambitious, early-career people to extract as much work as possible before they burn out. The employees use the grind to level up their skills and resume to pivot into a better job later.
I worked for one such company early in my career. Turnover was high. It was basically a pipeline that either led to burnout or a cushy, high-paying job elsewhere if you could survive the abuse long enough to get an impressive resume out of it.
The catch is that none of us wanted to talk about how terrible the working environment was, because it would only devalue those lines on our resume. So instead we kept quiet and let everyone assume the famous tech company and CEO we worked for were actually amazing places to work. Anything else would be self-sabotage. It's a strange cycle.
I have a good friend who worked there during the 90s and wrote a shitload of the backend ordering system. She went on to work at Google as Director of Site Reliability Engineering.
She has since moved on from that.
I think Jobs would be thought of exactly the same if he were around and in his prime today: a very controversial figure who produces amazing work but has his fair share of detractors for a number of reasons. Remember, Steve's behavior was barely tolerated by a large number of people. He was hated by many, loved by many, merely tolerated by most.
The linked post by Blaine Garst is _glowing_ proudly of having worked with Steve Jobs and the all star team he assembled. Quote: "great minds collaborating and challenging each other to succeed. With the best CEO on the planet." The "challenging each other" maybe the important point. If you are a normal dude it is easy being intimidated by a big ego. But if you are an A-player you can hold your ground?
Maybe it was even the case that engineers, who are focused on objective technical details/goals and having a thick skin, dealt best with Jobs?
He did mellow with age, though. The Steve Jobs biography actually latched onto this as a key narrative element—a way to construct Jobs's personal arch—and I do believe it's genuine based on everything else I've read about the guy.
And it's notable that Jobs only really reached his zenith in these later years. The original Macintosh had a splashy launch, but sales began dwindling pretty quickly[1], and NeXT never had much commercial success before Apple bought them. My admiration of Jobs is really for the person he was in his last decade. He was a visionary long before that, of course, but ideas are relatively cheap, and Jobs couldn't execute.
Jobs was, to be sure, certainly still a demanding figure at the end of his life (and I would not have wanted to work for him), but I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have him beat.
1: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
I could never work for Steve Jobs because I wouldn’t have put up with his ridiculous behavior and would have walked.
Part of the situation that lead to the MeToo movement was power, and Steve Jobs had a lot of power over people who worked for him.
This was something I knew since starting my career, and worked for the last ten years to make sure no one (other than governments) has so much power over me that I have to listen to them.
Was there abusive stuff going on there? Absolutely! And there's almost certainly some overlap here with other cases (actress submits to famous film executive because it's part of his "creative process"), but I don't know if the current/recent reckoning would do much to prevent a small, dedicated technical team from overworking themselves and tolerating abusive management practices in service of a new charismatic, visionary leader like Jobs apparently was.
I personally am tired of working at a firm where everyone has a voice that they’re always using.
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Not sure I've seen many (any?) instances of his abusive behavior being celebrated in my 30 years of following him. Certainly some awe over how scary he was.
I've often thought it amazing that he was as successful as he was despite his terrible behavior.
However, I think it depends a lot on where in his career arc this transition happened. If he had been caught out early on, it could well have kept him from rising. Imagine the Twitter furor if a rising exec got caught cheating his business partner, for example. [1] Of course, it could have gone the other way; his conscious manipulation of his image [2] could have led him to be less abusive, or at least better at concealing it.
But if it came later, once he was head of Apple, I doubt it would have mattered much. He was already notoriously an asshole. [3] People will accept a lot as long as the money keeps rolling in and the asshole seems irreplaceable.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-on-steve-jobs-...
[3] E.g., this from 2011. https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
I think the parent is using #MeToo as a catch-all for intolerance of any alleged abuse of power and cancel culture in general. And as others have mentioned Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are doing fine, so no Steve Jobs would have probably been fine in the current time.
To be fair, Jobs also didn't have a Twitter account. I don't know why, but that seems to do weird things to people.
Loved to work with him while he was sane.
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This is in stark contrast to most of today's companies, where you have front-end engineers who don't know anything about the backend they are interacting with, backend engineers who don't care about the frontend they are serving data to, database engineers who care about neither, etc.
And that's just software. The hardware might as well be a black box for the vast majority of software engineers working at your average software company today.
Where did we go so wrong?
Do you think that engineers designing the plumbing system of the F1 rocket engine knew pretty much anything about "compiler design" or "motherboard design"?
What you are in fact observing is a human system's tendency to adapt to growing complexity. Human systems adapt to growing complexity by specializing it's members to particular skills (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_specialization).
It's just a fact that way back then in the NeXT days, the computer was not as complex, the understanding of which was just about achievable by 1 human. Eventually, that metric exceeds 1.
For the case of the first apple computer, it was ~1 (Wozniak), in the case of Apollo, it was >100.
Cognitive Specialization is an aspect of all living things, but is very apparent in the Human species. Computers got more complex in just the same fashion as how farming went from a farmer, a bull, and a blacksmith, to gigantic conglomerates to make the fertilizer, tractors, watering system, etc., that comprise of >10,000 humans.
The real change was the change in the culture of computer use from original creation to consumption and distribution of certain limited kinds of creation - which are mostly imitative, nostalgic, and either backwards- or (at best) sideways-looking rather than genuinely original.
Real invention is now actively disfavoured. Google did a fair amount in the 00s but has slowly abandoned most of it, Amazon does a bit of blue sky but is mostly focussed on consumerism, Musk's idea of blue sky is straight out of a 1950s Tom Swift novel, and Facebook and Twitter are both hopeless. Netflix is cable TV done right - finally. But it's still cable TV.
There are some exceptions at Apple, which still has a kind of legacy tradition of doing cool new stuff (see also, M1) but even that is a mix of invention for the sake of it and strategic lock-in as a goal.
The result is a landscape full of development geared to comfortable suburban consumerism and associated corporate bureaucracy. There's very little interest in game changing technical development for the sake of it - which was more or less what NeXT was about. And there's even less interest in computing as subversion and empowerment, which was - believe it or not - a big interest in the 70s.
FOSS doesn't change this. (It likes to believe it does, but practically it really doesn't.)
Quantum computing and AI may be on the cusp - but even if they do something interesting they're going to be coopted by ad tech as soon as the paint dries.
So it's not about technical scope so much as imagination failure. The real loss is the loss of imagination - something that tech and media have both done a lot of damage to over the last couple of decades.
If you work at a hardware company, even in a role that's very far from hardware, you become aware of this stuff because it effects you. Even if you don't understand ASIC at all, you still know about, oh, such and such process node has this issue, because it impacted our schedule and somebody told me about it at a lunch table. And you may not even know how to solder, but you can say, oh this needs rework, 0 ohm resistor at point such and such to make the display work, because you need to know it to go to the lab and have the work done.
Really the thing I understood the least working at a company like that was actual productization. You hear about something you worked on a year and a half ago being a tablet, or an embedded device, and you'd be like, oh, that old thing is just being released now? And it's in that form factor? huh.
By getting it right, which saw an explosion in the market, leaving us in a position now where there is more work to be done than the people who understand systems from top to bottom can handle alone. If those pioneering efforts had failed, the tech industry would now be insignificant and those superstars would be struggling to find work, never mind those who have a lesser understanding/care.
This line really interests me. As someone graduating pretty soon - are there tech companies out there that that still have this culture? Everything seems marketing / product focused today. Besides going to graduate school, does anyone here feel like they are at a company like this?
I suppose Bell Labs might feel the same. I have a prof who goes to work there on summers occasionally taking a couple undergrads with him. He is one of the best teachers.