> my gut feeling says separating the drawing state from windows as in MS Windows is the better choice, but I also think having separate entities called “windows” and “controls” as on the Mac is the better choice.
I like to sum up the difference between Mac and Windows thusly. Probably glossing over a bunch of stuff but still:
* Steve Jobs toured Xerox and came away with an idea, and a fairly shallow one -- the windowed, mouse-driven, document-centric interface. This is what he then had his team implement in the Lisa and Mac. As implementations go, it was really good and it looked good, but it was really procedural Pascal code beneath. (You had to handle window moving and resizing yourself in early Mac OS. There were library functions to help, but you had to code all that into your application's main loop.)
* Microsoft, at right about the same time, was hiring guys out of Xerox PARC itself -- guys like Charles Simonyi -- and they brought with them a whole passel of ideas, not just concerning interfaces but also software design, things like objects and message-passing. That's why Windows could do things like handle the move and resize drag actions, and then just post WM_MOVE or WM_RESIZE to the target window. Windows were objects -- members of classes, even, and could receive messages.
Granted, Windows couldn't run in 128K -- and Jobs would pivot completely with NeXT and deliver an object-oriented desktop based on Smalltalk grafted onto C (Objective-C), but initially it seems Apple were trying to build a cheaper, more user friendly Xerox Star and Microsoft were trying to get as much of the Smalltalk environment as would fit in a PC without requiring devs to learn a new language.
FWIW, Steve agreed with your assessment. One of my favorite Jobs quotes:
I had three or four people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing. And so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind and they showed me what they were working on. And they showed me really three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was really a network computer system. They had over a hundred Alto computers, all network using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that.
I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
One way to describe NeXT is Steve returning to the two things he missed @ Xerox.
I like to sum up the difference between Mac and Windows thusly. Probably glossing over a bunch of stuff but still:
* Steve Jobs toured Xerox and came away with an idea, and a fairly shallow one -- the windowed, mouse-driven, document-centric interface. This is what he then had his team implement in the Lisa and Mac. As implementations go, it was really good and it looked good, but it was really procedural Pascal code beneath. (You had to handle window moving and resizing yourself in early Mac OS. There were library functions to help, but you had to code all that into your application's main loop.)
* Microsoft, at right about the same time, was hiring guys out of Xerox PARC itself -- guys like Charles Simonyi -- and they brought with them a whole passel of ideas, not just concerning interfaces but also software design, things like objects and message-passing. That's why Windows could do things like handle the move and resize drag actions, and then just post WM_MOVE or WM_RESIZE to the target window. Windows were objects -- members of classes, even, and could receive messages.
Granted, Windows couldn't run in 128K -- and Jobs would pivot completely with NeXT and deliver an object-oriented desktop based on Smalltalk grafted onto C (Objective-C), but initially it seems Apple were trying to build a cheaper, more user friendly Xerox Star and Microsoft were trying to get as much of the Smalltalk environment as would fit in a PC without requiring devs to learn a new language.