I recently found an interesting exchange in the comp.sys.mac.programmer.help newsgroup that cast a bit of clarity on an issue that has likely confused many...
A user queried...
As I stated in my last post, I've been out of the Mac loop. Anyhow, I can't
seem to find a straight-up answer to my question: What is Cocoa, and why
should I care/learn its API? Point me in the right direction please! I swear
I learn quickly!
Cocoa is the latest name for the Application and Foundation frameworks,
which
started out on NeXTSTEP and then got ported to a few other places.
Cocoa is the native Mac OS X API, despite Apple's need to pretend that
Carbon (i.e, the Mac Toolbox minus the things you'd better not try to
do in a multi-user, multi-tasking system) is something more than a
legacy compatibility library.
The reason to learn it is to gain the threefold productivity increase
that
NeXT developers typically got when moving from other platforms.
