What will be Mac OS XI's C#?

October 15, 2005

Rainer Joswig has a few thoughts about what Lisp might have to offer to address Apple’s long-term API and language challenge. Although I would like it to happen, I doubt Lisp has chance politically (via Ted Leung).

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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on October 15, 2005 12:25 PM. The previous post in this blog was DSM and UML. The next post in this blog is Mac Bass. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Comments

this article is so off-base its laughable.

  1. this idea that OSX is “behind” with reference to 2010 implies the author even knows what the needs of 2010 will be. no one does, but i will wager that desktop OSs will play a smaller role than they do today.

  2. while objective-C seems to be an apple-only community at this point, i don’t hear any significant grumblings about dropping or replacing it. nor do i hear laments that c# cannot be run on OSX (i can’t verify if mono builds via darwinports or fink).

  3. the “languages” of tomorrow are xhtml, css, xslt, xml, javascript, etc. languages are driven by domain need and applications. upon what domains and applications is lisp to be driven? emacs? at least ruby has a killer app (rails). you would think the lisp people would just accept that their superior language is essentially dead.

Posted by: grumpY! at October 15, 2005 10:33 PM | link

Which article do you consider laughable — Rainer Joswig’s or John Syracusa’s? While it’s pretty obvious that it’s going to be Lisp’s ideas only, not its syntax, I do believe Syracusa has a point. C#, while a possible solution technically, is about as likely as Lisp. Ruby Cocoa, now that would rock :-)

Stefan

P.S.: Any reason you don’t sign your name? Just curious.

Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at October 15, 2005 11:48 PM | link

I feel that Apple would be on the right track by starting to officially support PyObjC. That would give them a ‘higher level’ programming language with interfaces to existing APIs and would allow the Objective-C world to co-exist with the new platform language. (Remember that it’s the migration that’s always the hard part)

Isn’t promoting lisp as a mainstream programming language a bit 70’s?

Posted by: joosen at October 17, 2005 10:59 AM | link

My preference would actually be Ruby :-)

There is a Ruby/Cocoa binding as well. I agree that this using one of the dynamic languages with a Cocoa binding would be a nice transition.

Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at October 17, 2005 1:17 PM | link