I keep having trouble with CodeWarrior in that it destabilizes SheepShaver. I'm trying to get CW6 to work now.
It will often cause SheepShaver to just quit.
Hmm.. I'm not sure why. I'm using the CW7 release from macintosh repository. It has never crashed my SheepShaver and works really, really well (I'm using 9.0.4 from the install cd).
Do I have to break down and learn MPW?
There's not really much to "learn" in MPW lol. It's a really simple IDE, basically not much more than a code editor and compiler. The shell is awesome too. If you already know C++ and/or PASCAL it is basically self-explanatory. The only 5 minute stumble I came across was executing commands in the shell when I first looked at it. The shell is basically a text editor. However, if you want to run a command, you select the command's text and use Fn-Return (to use the 'Enter' key) to execute it.
My only caveat with it is that it has this great shell that you can't use in any of your applications. You have to write really complicated Apple Events from scratch when you could in theory just pass a one line command to ToolServer. But ToolServer can't act as a library. I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to find out if you can with no luck lol (if anyone knows a trick for this please save me). But of course, Codewarrior doesn't even have a shell, although you can use the MPW shell from within CW.
Also, although the language is the same, the way Apple used the C-language in its interfaces back in those days is quite weird lol. It's still the most supported language to use for a low level application- especially one that uses the Mac OS Toolbox. Pascal was pretty dominant at first but most of the later documentation I've seen is all in C. Apparently, Apple started using C quite a bit more in later years of Classic Mac.
If you just need to build something simple, it's WAY easier to use REALBasic though.