MIDI Life Crisis wrote:Shooshie wrote:...From 1986 to 2002 everything in Performer/DP just worked. ...
Shooshie
Do you know if there was an ownership, management, or personnel change (specifically software engineers?) at the time? I also wonder about how tech support is managed and if the bugs we report actually make it to the software engineers?
I can think of only one thing. There is a guy, Aaron Hillegass, who used to host a software camp for anyone wanting to learn Cocoa. He was well-known in the coding business. He wrote the book on OpenStep (literally) and he taught people simply and straightforwardly how to code in what he thought was the world's greatest programming environment: Cocoa. I forget which languages it focused on; probably C++ and Java. Cocoa wasn't so much a language as an environment, if I remember correctly. My son does all this stuff, so I only get a glimpse over his shoulder now and then, and he kind of wanted to go to that camp (Big Nerd Ranch), but I couldn't afford that, so we bought the book and followed him online.
One day in article about him, there appeared a line about Mark of the Unicorn and Digital Performer. It seems that maybe MOTU had brought him in either to train their programmers or to help program the OS X version of DP. This was at the beginning of our long wait for DP4. I have no way of knowing whether this was true or just wishful thinking on someone's part, but it was written as though it was just reporting on something that was happening at the time.
It became my assumption, then, that MOTU was having to do a lot of rewriting. The very framework for OSX apps did not allow the endless code-bloat from old languages that did not work according to certain parameters. If you had written your old app in certain languages, you were best-off just starting over and translating it into modern code. That was what Apple was telling everyone at the time, and there were charts that showed what would work and what would not work. I remember those charts very clearly, though I cannot tell you the languages that didn't pass muster. I do remember that C was ok, C+ was better, and C++ or Java were in the groove. Cocoa was where it was at, for once you'd laid out the groundwork for an app, you could reuse most of your code for the next app.
I tried visualizing DP in Cocoa, but I just couldn't see it. It's too big. Too complicated. Cocoa is small, quick, and standardized. Anyway, when Aaron Hillegass
allegedly went to work for MOTU, I figured they were having trouble. He was THE expert on Cocoa, and I just hoped that he would be able to take their code and make it work in a new environment. When I got DP 4, it was buggy in ways that told me it was written by someone not familiar with all the inner-connections of the program. There are so many interdependent links in DP, that you can't do anything, anywhere in the code without affecting some other part of the app. It seemed to me that it would be a virtual minefield for any programmer who didn't evolve with the app back in the 80's and 90's.
If I am correct, it would explain most of the problems we've been having. If MOTU's old programmer called it quits back during the shift to Cocoa, and new people took it over, it would have been a terrible dilemma for the company and for DP. It would take 5 or 6 years for new programmers to become familiar enough with the interdependent links and exceptions. Well, that time is rapidly approaching. May 2008 will mark the 5 year point since the release. If my calculations are correct, that's about when we should see a MAJOR shift in the quality of DP. Perhaps even sooner; perhaps in the next couple of months! After all, they were working on it in 2002.
Why 5 years? Personal experience. After 5 years of doing anything, you pretty much own it. After 20 years, you ARE it. But very few people will keep working a high-pressure job like programming the same application for 20 years. Unless, of course, the pay is amazing. I don't think MOTU has deep pockets, so I'm surmising that there was a pretty good shakeup of the original programmers at the time.
One other thing to consider: the original apps at MOTU were written by genius-level people with huge inspiration to make it as good as it possibly can be. As they became more successful, they
probably moved upward in management and hired coders. In the late 1990's, coding became the richest profession on earth. Good coders made well into the 6 figures, and small companies either wrote their own or had to make do with anyone they could get at prices they could afford. That could mean beginners or less-than-stellar programmers. Unless the original guys went back and exercised their chops and became music/programming forces again, as they were 20 years before, then it's possible that DP simply hasn't stood a chance at being the quality app it once was.
And there are many other possibilities as well. Perhaps management became blind to the time constraints of programming, and demanded releases before it was ready. Perhaps there was sabotage by a disgruntled programmer. Perhaps Cocoa has turned out to be the world's most buggy environment (I see bad things in nearly every app for OS X that I would never have seen in OS9). Perhaps all of the above. Perhaps none.
It's all speculation. All rumor. It says nothing about MOTU, and everything about how I think; and nothing more. But you asked; I just told you what I think.
Shooshie
, she still runs like a charm.
