Sorry to hear that he has passed. His book, "Object-Oriented Programming : An Evolutionary Approach" still influences how I think about and teach OOP today. His legacy will live for a long time.
Brad Cox has died
61–70 of 197 posts
Re: Brad Cox has died
#62There is no doubting the legacy of Objective-C (especially given the high likelihood you are reading this post on a mobile device, using app written in Objective-C), but to truly appreciate Brad's legacy, am curious about the appeal of using Objective-C. Having developed only one small iOS app with Objective-C code, I was mostly turned off by its overall verbosity in the context of NS prefixes. Hence, I ask the quest…
In the context of the time, C++ didn't exist yet. Objective-C was actually introduced just prior to C++, and both languages were effectively solving the same problem in different ways: C was the dominant language, and both language designers were trying to graft the OOP paradigm onto it. Objective-C is a thin-layer on top of C, adding Smalltalk-inspired object support. That's pretty much all there is to it. C, with s…
I'm curious--what happened to Objective-C in that fight with C++? Why didn't people go for its simplicity?
Re: Brad Cox has died
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the context of the time, C++ didn't exist yet. Objective-C was actually introduced just prior to C++, and both languages were effectively solving the same problem in different ways: C was the dominant language, and both language designers were trying to graft the OOP paradigm onto it. Objective-C is a thin-layer on top of C, adding Smalltalk-inspired object support. That's pretty much all there is to it. C, with s…
I'm curious--what happened to Objective-C in that fight with C++? Why didn't people go for its simplicity?
Part of it was licensing. Probably more of it was the personalities involved at e.g. Microsoft or SGI.
Re: Brad Cox has died
#64There is no doubting the legacy of Objective-C (especially given the high likelihood you are reading this post on a mobile device, using app written in Objective-C), but to truly appreciate Brad's legacy, am curious about the appeal of using Objective-C. Having developed only one small iOS app with Objective-C code, I was mostly turned off by its overall verbosity in the context of NS prefixes. Hence, I ask the quest…
Objective-C is verbose not just because of the NS suffixes. Everything is verbose (by today standards anyway). ObjC is a "child" of the 1980's when verbosity was considered a merit and a norm in programming. Two things that I used to like about it: - Combination of static typing and at the same time pretty high level dynamic typing: it was practically possible to call any method on any object, right or wrong, just li…
I loved the idea that the OOP world and the C worlds were syntactically different. It made the language significantly more elegant than C++, which doesn't even take into account the beauty of its Smalltalk message passing semantics.
Re: Brad Cox has died
#65Very sad. I had the privilege of taking a class from him at George Mason University, and he was (unsurprisingly) very knowledgeable. He worked hard to enable software reuse. No one was interested in his idea of trying to monitor component use during runtime to pay developers. That was an unworkable approach, and I told him that then. But the general world of making it easy to reuse components is a reality today, via…
> He worked hard to enable software reuse. No one was interested in his idea of trying to monitor component use during runtime to pay developers People are experimenting doing this in blockchain smart contracts. It’s transparent and supports micropayments as well.
Yupp! I made a little toy project for the EVM over a year ago with this exact concept, never really did anything with it sadly, life seems to find ways to get busy. Due to the nature of needing to send 'gas' to make function calls, it was a natural fit to add a call to send a small portion of the value to an address before returning the computations result.
I really loved the idea of being able to create libraries of code that could just be called for a small fee or copied for free if one didn't have the funds. I hope this idea continues to catch on, it seemed to me to be a perfect incentive fit for the open source world.
Re: Brad Cox has died
#66Having lived in Manassas, I express my deep regret that this pioneer spent his final years there.
If I had known he was literally down the road from me I’d have tried to pay my respects earlier and didn’t catch this in local news at all. It’s not that bad here probably compared to 10 years ago, especially with the VRE train routes to DC and new stuff downtown.
Re: Brad Cox has died
#67Having lived in Manassas, I express my deep regret that this pioneer spent his final years there.
If I had known he was literally down the road from me I’d have tried to pay my respects earlier and didn’t catch this in local news at all. It’s not that bad here probably compared to 10 years ago, especially with the VRE train routes to DC and new stuff downtown.
I moved there in 1992 from Warrenton, predictably due to misfortune. Couldn't get out of Bobbitt-Land fast enough. Glad it's improved.
Do city cops there still obsess over teen boy genitals? https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140709/07330027823/prose...
Re: Brad Cox has died
#68I am giving a talk in work soon around method swizzling in iOS and was delving into the history of Objective-C a bit and came across Alan Kay's talk about the power of simplicity and how we've all screwed up OOP. In the talk, Alan talks about the ant who lives his life on a single plane of existence, the "Gulley World" or "Reality". The ant goes to work, he finds stuff to eat, he lives his life in this Gulley World,…
What a great tribute you have written. When I first found about swizzling through a seasoned iOS dev I was blown away. The swizzling capability in obj-c basically helped create my first startup, InstaOps, a long time back which allowed no code change to instrument an app to capture logs and network performance metrics.
I second all of these comments. I was on the same team with him (Hi Prabhat, this is Paul D.) and concur that swizzling is a very powerful mechanism. It's definitely a good thing to know about if you're working with Objective-C.
Re: Brad Cox has died
#69There is no doubting the legacy of Objective-C (especially given the high likelihood you are reading this post on a mobile device, using app written in Objective-C), but to truly appreciate Brad's legacy, am curious about the appeal of using Objective-C. Having developed only one small iOS app with Objective-C code, I was mostly turned off by its overall verbosity in the context of NS prefixes. Hence, I ask the quest…
> Having developed only one small iOS app with Objective-C code, I was mostly turned off by its overall verbosity in the context of NS prefixes. This is actually a blessing because NS-/name prefixes are a simple approach to naming that keeps you humble. If you let programmers have namespacing they will invent enterprise software frameworks where every class is six layers deep in a namespace of random tech buzzwords t…
This plague of object wiring in code is pervasive in the Java world as well. The joy of declarative late binding and decoupled objects at compile time seems to be very lost on the vast majority of programmers.
Re: Brad Cox has died
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No one was interested in his idea of trying to monitor component use during runtime to pay developers. This reminds me of Project Xanadu's ideas about transclusions and associated royalties. What a coincidence that this was posted recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25875386
That makes sense. In addition, the telecomms were generally not interested in the very early Internet (TCP/IP) because they couldn't figure out how to do per-packet metering, and they assumed that was necessary. All 3 examples show that trying to do fine-grained metering, in ways that cause tremendous overhead, often don't work. It is sometimes better to make something so that it is "too cheap to meter".
superdistribution was superinteresting... but i felt the same as well when reading it... it could only work if everyone agreed at the same time to use the same protocols... and of course legislation... but it was definitely a grand vision and would have been interesting to see the effect on culture and creativity if it had actually panned out