Objective C... It is the weirdest language I've ever seen.
When I first looked at Objective-C I totally agreed with your statement. Then I was introduced to Smalltalk and Objective C started to make sense!
Ask HN: Which technology\language you find most difficult to learn?
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which technology\language you find most difficult to learn?
#22I have a couple for various reasons:
The hardest that I gave up on was Groovy. The language itself seems really nice, it was just hard because of the lack of documentation that I was able to find so I just switched to Scala since I had to learn it for a class anyways.
The hardest that I still use is Haskell. While there documentation is phenomenal compared to other languages, I have found that it isn't something that you can just pick up and start using and be able to write idiomatic programs without studying theory. For me, when I get to monads I struggled a bit. Then I get to the monadic bind and other operators like $ and . and I find I have to keep going back to tutorials to see when and how to use them properly.
Re: Ask HN: Which technology\language you find most difficult to learn?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
A company recently sued Epic for how crap it is but they lost. Silicon Knights sued Epic claiming that they were promised advanced features of the Unreal Engine that allegedly did not exist or were not supported in the way SK were led to believe. They allegedly ended up having to build their own engine for the game on top of the cost of the UE3 license. Epic discovered that the new engine was using source code from S…
I don't think courts are in a position to rule on quality of products unless it's blatant false advertising. I'd love to discuss this but my next job is likely to involve Unreal as well. All hail our lords at Epic. So instead I'll disagree with you on Perl which I thought was one of those saner replacements for bash, especially when it comes to one liners. So what languages did you think I meant? > Same reason C is s…
So what languages did you think I meant?
You mentioned bash, which I agreed with. I was also adding Perl to my personal list of complaints as a language I found difficult to learn.
Re: Ask HN: Which technology\language you find most difficult to learn?
#24For me it was (and still is) ORM, specifically Doctrine2. In principle it seems pathetically easy, but once the queries start getting immensely complicated ( Many-to-Many over multiple tables, with conditional form data, etc) I still find myself having to fallback to SQL.
Other contenders have been:
1. Bison ( tokens, parsing, syntax, was all difficult the first time around).
2. OpenGL because remebering function names for the api is RIDICULOUS! ahh glDrawElementsInstancedBaseVertexBaseInstance now what are the args again?
Re: Ask HN: Which technology\language you find most difficult to learn?
#25SML. I remember at CMU, the sophmore level programming language theory course (the name escapes me, it was 15-212) was wildly different than anything I had done before. All programming courses one took up to that point were the normal intro level courses that most passed out of and a data structures/algorithms course. Sitting down the first day and being introduced to SML along with language constructs with no analog…
You make me remember my compiler design course. I find it most difficult during my collage days. Thank god we didn't have SML
I wish my compiler course had used SML--then maybe I wouldn't have had to greenspun C++ so hard.
Re: Ask HN: Which technology\language you find most difficult to learn?
#26Objective C... It is the weirdest language I've ever seen.
besides brainfuck =p
I was reading an article about implementing an interpreter for Brainfuck in PyPy, and when the example code for some simple Brainfuck programs came up, I just stared. I really fail to see how one would go about programming just about anything in that language. (Here's the article in case anyone is interested, a pretty good read IMO: http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/04/tutorial-writing-interp...)
Re: Ask HN: Which technology\language you find most difficult to learn?
#27Objective C... It is the weirdest language I've ever seen.
Really? What do you feel was difficult?
Besides a gotcha with weird bugs when I called the superclass dealloc method before releasing members, I had a really smooth experience.
Re: Ask HN: Which technology\language you find most difficult to learn?
#28Javascript.. I have been working with the DOM for the past 3 years yet I feel like I still do not have a solid grasp of Javascript.
The DOM is not Javascript, it's just an API. A really, really sucky API. Use jQuery instead.
Re: Ask HN: Which technology\language you find most difficult to learn?
#29Javascript. I've learned the basics of SML and Ocaml, and a bit more than basics of Haskell, but I just can't bring myself to learn how to use JS effectively. More generally, I find it hard to learn how to do GUIs and pretty web pages.
Have you tried jQuery? The API:s to interact with the browser really sucks, but the core language isn't too bad IMHO.
If you abstract away the browser differences in event handling and DOM, it's pretty straight forward to build GUI:s.