Friday April 01, 2005 
brainstorms
ozan (oz) yigit's noteblog at sun. all my text and photography is released under a cc attribution-noncommercial-noderivs license. all my poetry requires explicit permission.
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Friday April 01, 2005 all the best hackers i know...
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.
so opens another charming paul graham essay titled Return of the Mac.
[no this is not an april fool's joke]
even though some of graham's essays are as irritating to my critical faculties as wearing a wool sweater in a humid august afternoon, i will take it easy on this one; i have been using macs since 1984; these days all my photography goes through a dual-cpu g4 and i carry a g4 ibook with me everywhere. also, i too know some good hackers who made the switch.
on the other hand...
old mac as a canonical hacker's computer? that is romantic fiction, especially when all you had to work with was a tinkertoy operating system (for some loose definition of that term). i did spend a lot of (wasted) time and energy hacking on macs; (even wrote a lisp interpreter for macs, macclisp - pun intended) for an excitable unix+vms hacker, macs were painful to program. just take a look at that fun event loop! veni, vidi, vomui. early choices: relatively clunky c compilers (aztec, think) with imitation shells, pascal or basic. no really worthwhile lisp (until lightship scheme) that i could recall. there may have been a useful smalltalk. if only those sofas at cambridge could talk...
another thing: what are those hardcore OS hackers doing with their new macs? i would really enjoy seeing some groundbreaking new stuff coming out of OS X we can use on sol10, [free|net|open]bsd and linux. [so far everything seems to be going the other direction, including the hackers...]
[on the right is my cover graphic for computing news, york university, 1984]
[addendum: graham likes to talk about taste and design; it would have been worthwhile to see him analyse mac designs in depth. here, one way is to be dazzled by their industrial and usability designs and come up with the usual platitudes; another way is to analyse the os, various api and protocol designs (eg. appletalk gets the prize for cutest solution - perlman, interconnections, second ed.) and algorithms (eg. apple numerics) as well. why, we call this computer science.]
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A moment of digression:
The perfect hacker's computer in the late '80s was probably the Amiga. The OS was almost completely orthogonal and consistent: there was no difference between a file system and an application, except for the messages that were accepted and returned from its message port. You could write an application that registered a message port where a filesystem was expected to register one, and it WAS a filesystem.
No memory protection, no security, but the hardware didn't provide for any of that. What the hardware DID provide for, it made as good a use of as was imaginable.
So... I'd just bought an Amiga, and I read the Mac documentation, and got to the event loop. And compared that to the Amiga's message-passing interface. If your reaction was bad, imagine mine...
But... fast forward to 2003. I got an old 7500 and a Sonnet G3 upgrade, installed Jaguar on it, and this was wonderful. I mean, yes, the goddamn eye-candy GUI that allocates raw bitmaps for every damn window or widget is a bloody memory hog, but at least I could get an OS that didn't suck and a GUI that didn't suck...
I'd love to write code that could be used by the Linux and Windows people, but the best hope of that is GNUstep, and Gnome and KDE have sucked all the energy out of GNUstep. So there's all this nifty hackery on OS X, including a nice Smalltalk-like language caled Fscript that integrates well with Cocoa and Objective C, but there's no way to deliver any of that back to the UNIX world because the UNIX world seems to have decided that they want to emulate the Windows environment on top of X11. Sigh.
How about Berlin? Or whatever it turned into, Fiasco, Fiesta, Festival, something like that...? Nope, it's gone rotted on the vine.
There's a lot of nifty low-level stuff under the APSL on opendarwin. But nobody seems to be paying attention to it.
So... "i would really enjoy seeing some groundbreaking new stuff coming out of OS X we can use on sol10, [free|net|open]bsd and linux."? Me too. How about you meet us halfway? because about the only practical cross-platform development environment above the GUI layer... right now... is Tcl/Tk. Which works, but it doesn't exactly saturate the eye with gorgeous OpenGL elegance.
Posted by Resuna on July 26, 2005 at 07:09 PM EDT #