March 93 - MacWorld SF Report
MacWorld SF Report
Steve Mann
MacWorld keeps getting bigger all the time. The Moscone Convention Center in San
Francisco is building a new wing that approximately doubles the existing space. It was
not completely finished for this show, but the basement level was opened up for
MacWorld exhibitors. My very rough estimate puts the show floor size at about
500,000 square feet of exhibits. The good news is that the whole show is in one
location. No more shuttle buses like the Boston MacWorld or previous San Francisco
shows.
In addition to the huge exhibit space, there were lots of meeting rooms and a full
conference agenda as well. I spent most of my time at Apple Developer Central, a
special room off the main show floor designed just for the the Apple Developer
Community. In addition to representing MADA at the Developer User Group table for
APDA (with the able assistance of Robert Lenoil), I spent the rest of the time talking to
old and new MADA members, people I used to work with at Apple (I was in
Evangelism), and tool developers. It was a pleasure meeting those of you that stopped
by to say hello.
Macintosh Common LISP
The best part about Developer Central is that all the most interesting development
tools and environments, both old and new, are usually collected in this one location.
Apple was there showing Macintosh Common LISP (MCL), Apple Events and Scripting
development, MPW, and of course MacApp. MCL seemed to be the most popular Apple
station. There are a surprising number of programmers out there that have been
exposed to LISP at one time or another, typically in an undergraduate course. After
working with Think C or MacApp, MCL makes Mac programming look pretty easy by
comparison.
Like Component Workshop, MCL is a dynamic compiler. You enter a function and it gets
compiled into 680X0 machine language immediately. The turnaround time is
remarkably fast. In addition, everything (all your code, all the objects from the
development environment, all externals, everything) is kept in one big object space.
This makes it possible to change the editor's behavior as you are editing code
fragments. For instance, it's very easy to add new behavior and fields to the Find and
Replace dialog, or steal the compiler's file menu, with all its behavior, and add it to
your application through the ClipBoard. MCL takes care of memory management and
garbage collection, has coherent error handling, a symbolic debugger, full System 7
support, and much more. The development environment takes about 4M RAM and
runtime requirements are usually smaller. If you are used to doing things the hard
way, you owe it to yourself to see a demo of MCL (like Microsoft's OLE 2.0 demo).
IcePick and SmalltalkAgents
You could see a raft of other developer tools at Developer Central-the Debugger,
ObjectMaster, DeeMaker, Prograph, Resorcerer, and the Symantec product line. The
most popular table probably belonged to Component Software. They were showing the
shipping version of Component Workshop (which will be old news by the time you read
this).
Sierra Software was also at Apple Developer Central. In addition to Inside Out and p2c,
the object Pascal to C++ conversion utility, they were showing an alpha version of
IcePick 3.0. In addition to having all the IcePick 1.x features with support for 3.0
views, the new version lets you work with 2.0 and 3.0 views simultaneously. It also
allows immediate conversion between the two formats (of course you might lose some
view information demoting from a 3.0 view to the 2.0 format). As soon as IcePick is
ready we will let you know (Sierra has promised it sometime in the first quarter).
One of the most interesting new products, announced at the show and being shown in the
tools exhibit, was Smalltalk-Agents from Quaser Knowledge Systems (QKS) in
Bethesda, Maryland. SmalltalkAgents is based on a superset of Smalltalk, with
extensions patterned after LISP and C. In addition to a completely dynamic environment
like MCL, full toolbox support, modest development and runtime hardware
requirements (68020 or greater with 5M RAM), and a very graphical development
environment, SmalltalkAgents also provides support for dynamic linking, preemptive
interrupt-driven threads, transparent memory management, international character
sets, and a rich class library. This product, which is scheduled to ship in April, looked
so good that I tried to convince QKS to come to MADACON [Note-they made it].
After looking at MCL and SmalltalkAgents in the same context as Component Workshop,
it seems clear that dynamic language environments have a very good chance of
becoming the development tools of the future. The benefits far outweigh the
disadvantages.
MADA MEETS AT MACWORLD
Finally, we were able to find space for a MADA meeting at this MacWorld. Component
Software, Emergent Behavior, Sierra Software, and Electron Mining all showed up to
talk about their products. Unfortunately, there was an Ingram-Micro D party that
same evening. Their notorious parties are tough competition, so our attendence was
modest but enthusiastic, about 40-50 people. One thing we did have over
Ingram-Micro D was the inimitable master-of-ceremony stylings by Carl Nelson,
MADA founder and luminary.
Component Software had the first spot on the agenda, showing (surprise!) Component
Workshop. As usual, the demo received a strong ovation and lots of questions. Gary
Odom of Electron Mining then talked about OOPC, a robust class library and application
framework built from ANSI standard C. You can use OOPC with either Think C or MPW
C. Compared to Component's robust hardware requirements (20 MBytes RAM,
Quadra-class machine), OOPC looks pretty mean and lean.
Emergent Behavior, our third presenter, is run by Dave and Steve Wilson. Dave, a
long-time MADA member and MacApp/OO guru, works for Taligent most of the time.
Steve, his son, handles the day-to-day development and business aspects of Emergent.
They both talked about some of the work they are doing building cross-platform,
application-specific frameworks and a minimalist framework called QuickApp. We'll
continue to provide coverage of their adventures in FrameWorks.
Finally, to round out the evening, Chris Arbogast showed off the new IcePick, and Curt
Faith, Sierra's president, demonstrated p2C, Sierra's object Pascal to C++ translator.
All in all, it was a good meeting. It would have been better if the hired audio-visual
person had shown up, but then it's always something.
Look for us again at Boston MacWorld. We'll try to let you know well in advance about
that meeting location and time, but sometimes it's tough to pin down a room until the
last minute. We send out announcements on MacApp2Tech$ and MacApp3Tech$. If you
don't subscribe to either of those addresses, but want to find out if we have any
activities planned around any major conference, contact us at
MADA@Applelink-.apple.com or give us a call at 408/253-2765.