alt Hacker NewsMany of the built-in types in Objective C all have names beginning with “NS” like “NSString”. The NS stands for NeXTSTEP. I always found it insane that so many years later, every iPhone on Earth was running software written in a language released in the 80s. It’s definitely a weird language, but really quite pleasant once you get used to it, especially compared to other languages from the same time period. It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power.
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satvikpendem • today at 1:47 AM
Well, there are many more devices running on a language written in the 70s.
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>It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power
What has had the staying power is the API because that API is for an operating system that has had that staying power. As you hint, the macOS of today is simply the evolution of NeXTSTEP (released in 1989). And iOS is just a light version of it.
But 1989 is not all that remarkable. The Linux API (POSIX) was introduced in 1988 but started in 1984 and based on an API that emerged in the 70s. And the Windows API goes back to 1985. Apple is the newest API of the three.
As far as languages go, the Ladybird team is abandoning Swift to stick with C++ which was released back in 1979. And of course C++ is just an evolution of C which goes back to 1972 and which almost all of Linux is still written in.
And what is Ladybird even? It is an HTML interpretter. HTML was introduced in 1993. Guess what operating system HTML and the first web browser was created on. That is right...NeXTSTEP.