[jrochkind1]

Yep, people don't often comment on how similar ruby and ObjC are, in fundamentals.

I think it's because both of them were so influenced by smalltalk, more than ObjC influencing ruby necessarily. But not sure.

But I'm still very curious if AR's creators knew EOF, yeah. I haven't found DHH mentioning it; not sure if there might be forgotten other person/people central to original AR architecture.

WebObjects itself was nice in many many ways (I think it's encapsulation of form handling is far better than anything anyone's managed in Rails)... but made a fundamental mistake in trying to keep a fundamentally stateful architecture and apply it to the web by putting what was effectively an opaque state ID in every single URL. This was a basically bad design for the web (although also provided for forementioned good encapsulation of form handling. :) ).

But yeah, the sense I get in my career is that we spend a lot of time trying to reinvent something that already existed, and getting close to being as good as it... then collectively moving on to the next language/platform and doing it again. With not a lot of progress. Up to and through the 90s, it seemed like there was actual progress in software design and architecture at the high-level, the level of affordances for developers to efficiently create reliable maintainable software, but it seems to me have stalled -- perhaps in favor of huge advances in more low-level stuff, better/different languages/language paradigms, etc.