Also, the GUI for building GUIs was great. Nothing really made you appreciate why they wanted objects so much as dragging buttons around and instantiating the class. It made sense internally to me as a university student at the time. Objective C was a "relatively simple" set of extensions (which I never really understood) over C (which I claimed to understand at the time) and the language made you aware of both "the magic" of what you were doing and, at the same time, how it related to the bare metal. I learnt a lot from it.
I'd love to know what this looks like to a straight-out-of-university developer of an Electron app, though.
Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path, but the moment you needed to do something different you were back to writing reams of code, there was a cottage industry of custom NSSplitView classes. Even just making a button a different color involved reinventing the wheel a substantial amount.
The current Electron/React approach has no happy path - everything uniformly requires some amount of boilerplate code. But when you need to deviate you are less likely to have to write a novella.
> Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path, but the moment you needed to do something different you were back to writing reams of code
I'm making this up, but perhaps this was beneficial for UI consistency across apps anyway?
Yes it was. But such consistency is double edged sword because it also leads to “if all you have is a hammer” UIs where UI elements are abused for roles that they shouldn’t be used for, because the alternative custom UI costs so much development time.
In general I’d say UIs are much better these days functionally, at the cost of much less consistent look and feel (UX) across apps.
Having implemented multiple programs in GUIs for GUIs (with GtK, UIKit and dabbling with AppKit)... I must say that I have my past self every time I want to go back and look how something works. At least with SwiftUI / reactive things the code can be searched and navigated and doesn't take ages to load.
Ahh NextStep. For some reason I was only thinking of Mac OS. Possibly because in 1988 i was a kid with an 8 bit spectrum clone who only saw NeXT machines in magazines ;)
I'd love to know what this looks like to a straight-out-of-university developer of an Electron app, though.