Re: ObjC documentation

[Ritesh Kumar]

On Mon, 06 Oct 2003 10:00:01 +0100, Nicolas Roard wrote:

> On 2003-10-04 23:11:51 +0000 Ritesh Kumar <ritesh.removethis@cs.unc.edu> 
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi!
>>       I was (trying to :-( ) go through the ObjC documentation on the
>> www.gnustep.org website. However, I am still not able to figure out a lot
>> many things related to the way ObjC is object oriented. I am having a hard
>> time trying to understand the language and that's a prerequisite before I
>> move towards the library.
>>      I got interested in the project after discussing about the fallacies of
>> the C runtime system in comp.linux.development.apps and got some
>> references to GNUStep. I am very interested in the project. I will
>> appreciate a lot if you can give me some pointers where I can find more
>> about objective-C both from a developers perspective and a language
>> analysts' perspective.
> 
> Well, I have compiled a list of availables documentations about GNUstep
> and Objective-C at http://www.roard.com/docs (see also 
> http://www.gnustep.org/resources/resources.html)
> try to read in particularly this excellent ObjC manual 
> http://toodarkpark.org/computers/objc/
> -- it's the original ObjC manual from NeXT, and it is very complete and well 
> written.
> 
>>      I am still wondering why this project hasn't got the mass attention as
>> GNOME or KDE gets... strikes very odd! If I am thinking correctly (please
> 
> IMHO :
> Well, lack of publicity, plus some architectural problems for the 
> implementation
> (a display postscript should be required theorically ...), plus the fact that 
> many
> people didn't knew NeXT so they didn't saw what was the advantage comparing
> to more easy approach like KDE or GNOME (ie, rebuild everything, but
> incrementally, so people could use them and get hooked, then rebuild
> everything for v2, etc.).
> Plus the fact that KDE and GNOME try to mimick more known desktop, while
> GNUstep try to build something similar to NeXTSTEP for the look and feel,
> but there wasn't millions of NeXTSTEP users .. (explain the services..)
> And GNUstep is an implementation of OpenStep, it's a strength, but it was 
> also a
> problem in that perspective, because you couldn't really use it and see the
> bonus of OpenStep while the implementation wasn't enoughly complete.
> Now that GNUstep is somewhat useable to program GUI applications and
> use them -- even if it is far from perfect and bug free -- there is an 
> increase
> of interest from people.

Thanks a lot for the pointers. I will go through them. Do you (or rather
the GNUStep team in general) has a plan for publicity? I mean one easy way
to get attention would be to enable users to have snazzy graphical
displays on their comps. After all "the first impression is the lasting
impression". You generally do not have a lot of people like me who stumble
on GNUStep while hunting for a good runtime support in a compiled
language :-). So perhaps one of the easiest ways to go for it
would be to make a "theme adaptor" in GNUStep (I don't know how far that
is possible) for GTK and QT themes. I think QT would be a problem as it
would cause C++ to come into the picture but GTK should be fine. If some
user does want to have a different UI why not give it to them? The people
who are more willing to go with the NEXTStep interface for usability
issues would remain with NEXTStep (this might also finally turn out to be
the case for the users who initially came to GNUStep because of it looks).
The only reason why I say so is so that
GNUStep gets wider recognition. After all simple window managers like E ,
just because of their looks, get a lot of attention. Even after a lot of 
search I was not able
to find even one working Linux+GNUStep distribution. SimpleGNUStep seems
to be the only one active but they don't have any files for download. I am
currently using GNUStep on my Gentoo but even there I have still not been
able to install GWorkspace. In fact I am probably only using WindowMaker.

The moment GNUStep has a userbase, it would encourage people to publicize
whatever they feel about Obj-C which I think is very crucial. Plus it
would cause more "demand" for applications integrating with the GNUStep
Framework. I would really love to see and work on a completely self
contained GNUStep distribution.

This is just the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this gem of a
project. 

-- 
Ritesh Kumar    Graduate Student     cs.unc.edu
"The Difference between Insanity and Genius is nothing but of Success"
                                  -- Eliot Carver (Tommorow Never Dies)