[Gametes]

Is C# to .NET as ObjC is to X? An underdog language being pressed? What is C# of it's own right? C++ + microsoft = C--?

And what the heck [i[does[/i] NS mean when it prefixes all those Cocoa APIs? Is it just some letter combination apple thought would be safe to denote their framework and not overlap with other user functions, or is it an abbreviation for something?

[mikebeam]

I don't think C# and Obj-C can be compared like that. C# i think is something completely new from Microsoft. Obj-C on the other hand has been around for some time, and has a reputation for being a pure Object Oriented language of some caliber. I think back that back when object oriented languages were maturing, Obj-C was a serious challenger to C++ as the OO version of C. Obj-C was also the language NeXT choose for their software development.

As to the seconde question, my understanding is that NS is an abbreviation for NeXT Step. all of the classes in AppKit and the Foundation Framework which are Cocoa are Apple's inheritance from NeXT. When people say OS X is based on NeXT Step, they aren't kidding. So much of the code is the same, it seemes to me. It is also my understanding that all public classes are prefixed with something like NS so there are no conflicts between public frameworks like those supplied by Apple in OS X, and frameworks developed by third parties. For example, the company Stone Designs have some public Cocoa classes available that are prefixed by SD. Hope that clarifies your questions.

I'm pretty new to all of this, so please forgive me if any of this information is inaccurate. To the best of my knowledge, i believe it is pretty much inline with reality.

[parallax]

From what I've heard from people, C# just sucks. Don't even talk about it :-)

Anyways, the classes used to be NX, then they changed it to NS for NeXTstep, in my understanding.

[Mooseyard]

I've read through all the C# documentation and I think it has a lot of promise. It's very similar to Java but does some things differently (delegates are IMHO a much nicer mechanism than inner classes for event based programming) and introduces some C++ concepts. It also supports "structs" or stack-based objects and unifies them with heap based objects in a fairly elegant way.
Of course, I haven't had a chance to actually use the language.
By way of comparison, I've got five years extensive experience in Java (including app development as well as the implementation of the AWT frameworks) and about ten years' experience in C++. And five months of Objective-C :-)

[strobe]

From what I've seen, C# is not new. C# is a wrapper for COM which can be used for some inflexible languages (obviously not including ObjC).

C# certainly has more hype however.