This Program is PointOfLightWare. That is, if you like the Game of Life, please donate an extra twenty dollars to your favorite charity. Feel free to pass Life along, but make sure you enclose this letter.
For five years I have been trying to program the Macintosh. My sample project has always been the Game of Life. I chose Life because it is a simple, but not too simple program. Just complex enough to be considered a real Macintosh application.
I have tried many development systems. MacModula 2, TML Pascal, Think Pascal, Think C, Aztec C, MPW Pascal, Allegro Common Lisp, SmallTalk V Mac, C++, and others. But something always went wrong. Either I became impatient with the toolbox, or the development environment had lousy turnaround, or the resulting program was too slow, or not of professional quality.
Then I heard about object oriented programming. "Eureka!!" I said. But, as we sometimes learn, what looks good on paper doesn't work in practice. Anyone who has worked with MacApp 1.1 and MPW knows what I mean. A terrible disappointment.
But then came the MacApp developers association. And MacApp V2.0b9. And ViewEdit. And the MacApp tutorial. And better documentation. And Think Pascal V3.0. Two Jeffrey-months later Life was finished. (Then I saw her face. Now I'm a believer....)
Life is not brilliantly constructed. Any expert MacApper will probably get a good chuckle out of the source code. But it is finished, of good quality, and, in my opinion, easily supportable and modifiable by anyone familiar with MacApp. That was the goal I set five years ago when I unpacked my first Macintosh.
The moral of the story is this: For small development groups, who have been waiting for a feasible Macintosh development environment, the wait is over. Watch out for the learning curve, buy plenty of memory, and good luck.
Jeffrey W. Stulin
Computer Software Consultants, Inc.
200 Boylston Street
Chestnut Hill, MA 02167
Apple Link # D1104
P.S
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. A million "Thank you"s to the Apple MacApp group, to the MacApp developers Association, to Symantec's Think Pascal team, and to Paul Shapiro, my high school Computer Science teacher, who first introduced me to computers and to The Game of Life. That was a long time ago.
P.P.S.
Oh yeah, I've also included the complete, commented, source code.
