Ask HN: Getting into OS X/iOS development as a Rubyist: learn macruby first? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Getting into OS X/iOS development as a Rubyist: learn macruby first?

#11

Post by ddagradi » Mon, May 23, 2011, 2:11 AM UTC

jmonegro wrote: post #8

ddagradi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely possible to start with MacRuby. It just requires a little more overhead to translate Cocoa documentation into methods that work with MacRuby (not to mention the occasional one that doesn't work right...). As a Rubyist, there's definitely some differences (named parameters, for instance), but you get the hang of it pretty quick. As a Cocoa developer, debugging with MacRuby has issues, as Xcode doesn't…

With what you know, would you recommend I skip MacRuby and jump straight into obj-c/cocoa?

I would. MacRuby adds to the experience once you already know what you're doing. As an introduction to Cocoa, it adds a lot of difficulty too.

Re: Ask HN: Getting into OS X/iOS development as a Rubyist: learn macruby first?

#12

Post by lrz » Mon, May 23, 2011, 7:11 AM UTC

hmottestad wrote: post #10

jmonegro wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Even though I know I'll eventually transition to Objective-C, I was wondering if learning MacRuby first would tender down the learning curve by easing me into how Apple development works by leveraging my existing knowledge. What do you think?

I would just go for objective-c. MacRuby is in version 0.1 and might be more of a headache to figure out and circumvent bugs and holes then just learning objective-c. It's not a very difficult language and easy enough if you have tried C or Java before. You'll also need to handle memory (allocation and deallocation), but you could try to rely on GC, but not for iOS. Lynda.com has a video tutorial on objective-c and a…

MacRuby was version 0.1 about 3 years ago. A lot happened since, and we expect the next release to be our 1.0 RC. For Cocoa development, it's very stable, we haven't received any critical bug report since at least 3 releases.

Re: Ask HN: Getting into OS X/iOS development as a Rubyist: learn macruby first?

#13

Post by runjake » Mon, May 23, 2011, 8:35 PM UTC

If your objective is to write Mac OS X/iOS apps, move directly to Objective C.

As others have mentioned, there is no MacRuby for iOS, and the MacRuby for Mac OS X is fantastic, but a lot less capable than Objective C, still.

No slam to MacRuby though, as I suspect they'll be a tier 1 Mac development platform in the next 5 years.

Re: Ask HN: Getting into OS X/iOS development as a Rubyist: learn macruby first?

#14

Post by hmottestad » Mon, May 30, 2011, 3:53 PM UTC

lrz wrote: post #12

hmottestad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would just go for objective-c. MacRuby is in version 0.1 and might be more of a headache to figure out and circumvent bugs and holes then just learning objective-c. It's not a very difficult language and easy enough if you have tried C or Java before. You'll also need to handle memory (allocation and deallocation), but you could try to rely on GC, but not for iOS. Lynda.com has a video tutorial on objective-c and a…

MacRuby was version 0.1 about 3 years ago. A lot happened since, and we expect the next release to be our 1.0 RC. For Cocoa development, it's very stable, we haven't received any critical bug report since at least 3 releases.

Ah. I read 0.10 and thought 0.1. It's a logical mistake to make since 0.1 is a number and is the same as 0.10, I know a lot of other people count releases the same way, but skipping 0.10 might be a bit helpful, or keeping to a strict 0-9 policy. I saw Linus got tired of the 2.6.39 counting and just skipped ahead to 3.0.