NEMADA News)
Dave PomerantzE
August_
Getting Organizedv
SRuss Brenner of Avalon started the August meeting by asking for a volunteer to take
Xnotes. I failed to step back quickly enough, so you'll have to bear with my sodden prose
Tthroughout these minutes. David Neubert of The Christian Science Monitor was equally
Xslow on his feet and will be handling the organizational details of our chapter. For the
Vnear future we'll continue to meet at Component Software's offices in Lexington. Watch
SMacApp3Tech$ for more details. If you're not on the MacApp3Tech$ mailing list, give
Kyour AppleLink address to Russ (AppleLink: AVALON) or me so we can keep you
informed separately.‡
3Meetings are held on the last Tuesday of the month.¯
!Component Workshop Demonstration
MStoney Ballard, head of Component Software, wowed this group of skeptical New
QEnglanders with a demonstration that ran past 10 pm. If you haven't seen the July
Missue of FrameWorks, get yourself a copy and read Jeff Alger's article on the
PComponent Workshop (CW) and its implementation of C++. This is not your father's
NCFront. It's a fast and powerful development environment that will change your
Uapproach to software. Do you want to change? Well, that doesn't matter, now, does it?
ZMacApp is dead, so you'll have to change, and besides, it's an election year and change is
in the air.
QFrom Component Software, the winds of change seem to whirl around Stoney Ballard.
UHe's an OOP evangelist, every bit as ardent as Jeff Alger.1 Stoney 's emphasis on the
ROOP paradigm pervades every aspect of this revolutionary product. He and his group
Qhave taken C++ where no (Unix) compiler has gone before, but there is a religious
Uaspect to this pilgrimage. Everything is an object, and fundamental language elements
Xlike structs and typedefs aren't yet supported.2 If you are dealing with elements of the
Penvironment that speak in terms of data structures, like the Mac OS, you must be
Vprepared to write libraries of subroutines to access these structures. Like SmallTalk,
;it's a world of objects that's intolerant of anything else.
XAt this point, I've consigned my electronic mailbox to the slings and arrows of outraged
QOOPers. I feel that it's necessary, however, to balance their enthusiasm for this
Ifledgling system (which I share in many, many ways) with the realities of
Udevelopment. But let's talk for a moment on the side of enthusiasm before we get back
to reality.5
OCW is fast. We're talking orders of magnitude. Fifteen seconds to make a changeA
Vcompared to fifteen minutes with MPW. That's a qualitative difference. For this alone,M
WI would spend several months converting to CW. But we're not done singing it's praises.c
UIt eliminates the necessity for handles without causing memory fragmentation. It doeso
Sthis with its own memory manager and throws in garbage collection so you don't have{
Tto worry about freeing objects. (Ever crash in a destructor trying to delete someone
Welse's object?) It figures out which functions are monomorphic, so all functions can be
Wvirtual without loss of efficiency. It supports multiple inheritance. It holds all your
Ssource code in a database and applies that simultaneous knowledge to help you every
Jway it can. It supports the Macintosh and wil