Subject: Object Oriented Programming in NeWS

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 87 11:30:31 EST

Date: Tue, 3 Mar 87 09:29 EST
From: Robert Scheifler <[email-masked]>
Subject: Object Oriented Programming in NeWS
To: [email-masked]

(Flames for that nice charcoal flavor :-)

    It's an excellent example of the elegance and power of PostScript, and
    shows how one can use object oriented programming to build flexable,
    easy to modify user interface mechanisms in NeWS.

Gee, perhaps you should all stop programming in C (or whatever), and program
exclusively in this language designed by afterthought.  As one who uses an
OOPS in everyday programming, I tend to yawn at this.  If this is so important,
perhaps it would have been better to start with Smalltalk and embed the PostScript
graphics model in it, and get compiled code performance along the way.  OOP is
fine, but this is just another indication that stability of the NeWS interface
may not be all that easy to maintain (not to say that X is any better, just that
it may not be any worse).  Suppose Sun had taken a few more months to discover
this hack, and NeWS had shipped without it?  What happens when they come up with
a better class hierarchy?

Gosling stated at COMPCON that the NeWS environment was getting rather nice,
(interactive, OOP, debugger, etc.) so much so that people at Sun were being
seduced into downloading too much code.  When asked what "too much" was,
he said a 5000 line PostScript program was an example of too much.  This
power might well price NeWS right out of the low-end terminal (not workstation)
market (if you believe such a market will develop).  I think NeWS is a great of
example of solving the right problems, but probably in the wrong way.  If people
instead committed to crawling out of the non-incremental, non-interactive, non-OOP
world of C, and worried about shared libraries and other facilities, they might find
the entire next generation of applications a whole lot easier to write and maintain,
not just the display frontends of some applications.