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In defence of Objective-C

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Re: In defence of Objective-C

#41

Post by mquander »

For example, to filter an array is lovely:

  filteredArray = [allRecords filteredArrayUsingPredicate:
    [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"someField == %d", someFieldFilterValue]];
A four-word name for filter and filtering for equality by using a string formatting DSL are not really on my list of lovely things. I'm sure Objective-C does something well but this guy is not pointing it out.

Re: In defence of Objective-C

#42

Post by saurik »

davedx wrote: post #37
tolmasky wrote: post #11

As someone who likes Objective-C a lot, I have to say this is a pretty bad defense of it. No offense, clearly we are both fans of the language, I just don't think this will convince anyone on the other side. In fact, I find very little defense of it at all in this post. It seems his fundamental argument is "its a matter of taste", which while true, in no way conveys the many "whys" of the choices made in this languag…

I stopped reading at: "Things like factories, adapters, and other design patterns are all thankfully not there." Huh? Design patterns are "thankfully not there"? What does that even mean?

Not that I agree with him, but I do understand what he meant by that, and might be able to explain slightly: many people believe that "design patterns" are something that languages like Java (quite in particular, this language is held up during these conversations) require to work around design deficiencies.

Arguably, this is true: many of the patterns simply "fall away" if you have access to features like multi-method dispatch (Lisp+CLOS), message passing with transparent proxying (as in SmallTalk, and to some extent Objective-C), or continuations (Lisp/Scheme).

However, the argument often goes even further into the realm of complaints against "all kinds of patterns, even those that tend to exist in all abstractions, even mathematical ones", deriding things like factories as "overly-complex" (in the same concept of "overly-complex" that make some people choose NoSQL over RDBMS not for scalability, but due to the common lack of schemas).

Re: In defence of Objective-C

#43

Post by saurik »

masklinn wrote: post #40
saurik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages with macros and (often) monads allow developers to redefine the syntax and types to accomplish these goals. The point I am making here is that there is a reason why language designers make this tradeoff: it isn't at all obvious that languages should have a built-in container syntax, and when you find languages that don't you can (and should) notice a pattern. (C++11 is actually an interesting thing to analy…

> Languages with macros and (often) monads allow developers to redefine the syntax and types to accomplish these goals. You can't redefine haskell's syntax unless you're using Template Haskell (which is a language extension, not part of Haskell itself). It also has nothing to do with monads. Likewise with most MLs, or with Erlang. All of them have a literal list syntax. And if containers have no reason to be special,…

The way the do notation syntax (used by most people for describing monads) in Haskell translates to function application allows you to do some fairly interesting things with syntax abuse.

As for strings, it is very seldom that you find interesting alternative implementations: the only one I can think of is a rope. Interestingly, C++11 now allows you to override string literals, so you can actually do this.

Re: In defence of Objective-C

#44

Post by freemarketteddy »

chubs wrote: post #18
flitzwald wrote: post #12

There is one thing in Objective-C that still gets my goat, even after 8 years of working with it: it's the lack of syntax for container-types: [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithConstructorIDontWantToType:...] is just a huge pain in the ass. Other problems with the syntax have been solved by introducing sugar at the right place. Why not id hash=@{ @"key" : @"value }; and id array=@[ @"value1", @"value2", @"value3"];

There's ConciseKit for precisely this problem: https://github.com/petejkim/ConciseKit We use it in a lot of our code here. Its quite nice. You'll end up with something like: myDict = $mdict(val, key, val2, key2);

wow thts pretty cool!

Re: In defence of Objective-C

#45

Post by freemarketteddy »

saurik wrote: post #23
freemarketteddy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please understand that to do anything in Objective C you must pass a message to an object.So when we write. MyArray *array = [[MyArray alloc] initWithObjects:@"string1",@"string2",...]; Lets understand this in two steps: Step 1) You first allocate an object of type NSArray by passing a message "alloc" to the NSArray Class object.Yes every class in objective C is really a class object in the Objective C runtime.Now th…

The poster seems to be complaining that there is not similar syntax to many scripting languages, where you can do [@"string1", @"string2"], not about two-phase message allocation; he wasn't complaining for "dictionaryWithConstructorIDontWantToType:", he was complaining against it. In this specific case, you actually can usually use "arrayWithObjects:" (yes, the syntax that the poster didn't like), and it is frankly p…

Yes..arrayWithObjects is definitely a better choice in this case...I was just trying to point out what exactly a line like object = [[[MyClass alloc] initWithObjects:@"",...] autorelease] means...and why it is more powerful than writing object = @"",@"",@"",.

Although the latter approach can be taken by using macros ,I was making an argument for the beauty of the first approach.For example it would not be possible to allocate a singleton object with a line like that in Python.

Re: In defence of Objective-C

#46

Post by pvg »

saurik wrote: post #19
tolmasky wrote: post #11

As someone who likes Objective-C a lot, I have to say this is a pretty bad defense of it. No offense, clearly we are both fans of the language, I just don't think this will convince anyone on the other side. In fact, I find very little defense of it at all in this post. It seems his fundamental argument is "its a matter of taste", which while true, in no way conveys the many "whys" of the choices made in this languag…

On #4: personally, I believe it is a mistake to attempt to abstract memory management from developers unless you can abstract all resource management (as there is no fundamental difference between memory mappings, file handles, database connections, or minimum-wage bicycle messengers), and in the attempt to fully abstract memory management (as in, with garbage collection) it usually becomes impossible to abstract arb…

>as there is no fundamental difference between memory >mappings, file handles, database connections, >or minimum-wage bicycle messengers

The number of programs you can write without file handles, database connections or minimum-wage bicycle messengers is dwarfed by the number of programs that are extremely painful to write without dynamic memory allocation. We can argue all day about how 'fundamental' the difference is but there is a profound practical difference well-recognized in the decades of work that's gone into memory GC. 'It's ok/actually awesome that Obj-C kind of blows at memory management because other languages kind of blow at universal resource management' is a pretty specious argument.

Re: In defence of Objective-C

#47

Post by Derbasti »

plinkplonk wrote: post #5

If you have worked in smalltalk and C (a somewhat rare combination these days, I must admit) , Objective C is trivially readable.

And even if you haven't, you can learn how to read it in ten minutes. Say what you want about Obj-C, but I think its readability is really outstanding.

Re: In defence of Objective-C

#48

Post by koenigdavidmj »

chubs wrote: post #18
flitzwald wrote: post #12

There is one thing in Objective-C that still gets my goat, even after 8 years of working with it: it's the lack of syntax for container-types: [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithConstructorIDontWantToType:...] is just a huge pain in the ass. Other problems with the syntax have been solved by introducing sugar at the right place. Why not id hash=@{ @"key" : @"value }; and id array=@[ @"value1", @"value2", @"value3"];

There's ConciseKit for precisely this problem: https://github.com/petejkim/ConciseKit We use it in a lot of our code here. Its quite nice. You'll end up with something like: myDict = $mdict(val, key, val2, key2);

And the values and keys are still backwards.

Re: In defence of Objective-C

#50

Post by zvrba »

davedx wrote: post #37
tolmasky wrote: post #11

As someone who likes Objective-C a lot, I have to say this is a pretty bad defense of it. No offense, clearly we are both fans of the language, I just don't think this will convince anyone on the other side. In fact, I find very little defense of it at all in this post. It seems his fundamental argument is "its a matter of taste", which while true, in no way conveys the many "whys" of the choices made in this languag…

I stopped reading at: "Things like factories, adapters, and other design patterns are all thankfully not there." Huh? Design patterns are "thankfully not there"? What does that even mean?

Probably that you can get stuff done simply, without writing a lot of boilerplate code.
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