NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/comp/sys/mac/oop/macapp3/582

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-23 | 2.5 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!apple!applelink.apple.com
From: [e-mail]
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.oop.macapp3
Subject: MacApp Castaways & Prograph
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 22 Jan 93 09:31:00 GMT
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From: "Mark Szpakowski" <[e-mail]>
To: MACAPP3TECH$@applelink.apple.com

There was a recent message on the Internet OODL mailing list, that I believe
originated on this list, addressed to "MacApp Castaways".  I read this two wa
ys:

- MacAppers' feeling of abandonment by Apple, and fear of getting shipwrecked
 on
Bedrock;
- desire, or *need*, for more dynamic language/environment than C++/MacApp:
therefore interest in the good ship OODL.

Component Workshop (newborn), Camelot (prenatal), and Dylan (conceived) are n
ew,
proposed OODL environments.  Smalltalk and CLOS are existing OODLs. And there
's
Prograph, several years old, which might be called a VOODL - a Visual OODL.
Visual not just in the Microsoft sense of visual environment for creating vis
ual
applications (gag me with a spoon, they've even renamed their C++ to "Visual
C++"!), but also as visual *language* in visual environment for GUI apps.

The visuality makes Prograph unique, offers some enormous benefits (especially
as embedded in Prograph's edit-&-debug-both-interface-and-code-while-running
environment), but also presents some problems:
- due to past history of visual languages, they are often perceived as Mickey
Mouse;
- an executable iconic dataflow language is a rad thought to grok for many
people (look ma, no local variables!). Often the question is asked, "where's
the
code behind this?". The answer, of course, is "you're looking at it". From the
point of view of the destination side of the paradigm shift, the question is
as
whimsical as asking a Chinese person where the English is behind the ideograms
(except that dataflow is far more familiar, especially to corporate types, th
an
is Chinese).
- there are many tools, by many vendors, available for dealing with textual,
ASCII code (editors, parsers, version control tools, etc.), but not for any
other type of code.

The question to this list is, is this a fair assessment, and how do you see
Prograph as a VOODL and as an alternative for MacApp castaways?

-- Mark

Mark Szpakowski, [e-mail]
TGS Systems, [phone], FAX [phone]



Mark Szpakowski, [e-mail]
TGS Systems, [phone], FAX [phone]