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I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

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Re: I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

#31
post #14

Would anyone care to comment on the state of Obj-C outside the Mac/iOS platforms? The impression I get from previous posts on this is that the utility of Obj-C is closely tied to the functionality provided by the (proprietary) Cocoa platform. Since there are so many developers from outside the Apple ecosystem learning Obj-C in order to develop for iOS, is there any signs of a movement in the other direction? Are deve…

You might want to check out Étoilé - http://etoileos.com/

Re: I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

#32

People who like C should definitely take a look at Go. I think it can be a good alternative for higher-level projects.

I was personally a little off-put by Go. Some things just felt a little odd to me, after an admittedly small amount of time with the language (implemented a trivial app with it to play around). That said, I did quite like some aspects of it: goroutines, channels, functions can be added to structs. I am hoping that rust makes it out of the lab at some point.

My biggest annoyance with Go is that Google, a search company, gave their language a completely un-Google-able name. I'm pretty sure the term "Go" invokes special handling.

Re: I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

#33
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was personally a little off-put by Go. Some things just felt a little odd to me, after an admittedly small amount of time with the language (implemented a trivial app with it to play around). That said, I did quite like some aspects of it: goroutines, channels, functions can be added to structs. I am hoping that rust makes it out of the lab at some point.

My biggest annoyance with Go is that Google, a search company, gave their language a completely un-Google-able name. I'm pretty sure the term "Go" invokes special handling.

Googling for "golang" seems to work pretty well.

Re: I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

#35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a lot of experience in Go either (I'm writing my bot for the AI challenge in Go), but so far I've been very happy with it. What did you feel was odd?

I'm not the OP, but it felt like Go was coming from a culture a little bit different from the mainstream programming culture. The guys who made Go have worked together at Bell labs for year on stuff like Plan 9 and to me it seems that they lost touch with the rest of the world.

> The guys who made Go have worked together at Bell labs for year on stuff like Plan 9 and to me it seems that they lost touch with the rest of the world.

Before they worked on Plan 9 they created Unix, that the *nix world lost its way from its simple, small and beautiful roots is clearly something that still pains them greatly.

I would not say that they lost touch with the rest of the world, but that the rest of the world lost touch with them, which has been a great loss.

Re: I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

#36
post #17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of these days I will write a detailed account of my experience learning Obj-C, but for now I'll say this: The fact that Obj-C takes C and adds objects on top is its biggest flaw, just like with C++. Worse than C++ though, Obj-C doesn't even attempt to fix at least some of C's more glaring flaws... you get the whole language, quirks and all.

I think it depends on what you want from the language. If you want to write C and gain some safety through the use of the message-passing abstraction, it's perfect. If you want a real high-level language, it's lousy.

With clang, ObjC is getting very interesting features that take it closer and closer to "real" high level languages, like GCD, ARC and blocks. I'd still like more type safety, but the evolution there is slower and would need more fundamental changes to the language and abandoning C compatibility.

Re: I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

#37
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was personally a little off-put by Go. Some things just felt a little odd to me, after an admittedly small amount of time with the language (implemented a trivial app with it to play around). That said, I did quite like some aspects of it: goroutines, channels, functions can be added to structs. I am hoping that rust makes it out of the lab at some point.

My biggest annoyance with Go is that Google, a search company, gave their language a completely un-Google-able name. I'm pretty sure the term "Go" invokes special handling.

If that really bothers you, you can either search for 'golang' or you can use this custom search engine: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/go-search

But really if that is your biggest issue with the language, I think they are doing a pretty damned good job.

Re: I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

#38
post #14

Would anyone care to comment on the state of Obj-C outside the Mac/iOS platforms? The impression I get from previous posts on this is that the utility of Obj-C is closely tied to the functionality provided by the (proprietary) Cocoa platform. Since there are so many developers from outside the Apple ecosystem learning Obj-C in order to develop for iOS, is there any signs of a movement in the other direction? Are deve…

I get the impression most developers use Objective-C because they have to, rather than because they want to. Take a look at the Tiobe graph for Objective-C: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Objective-C.ht... I have a feeling it would see a distinct dropoff in usage if Apple were to change their focus to, say, Java or C++.

It's my favorite C variant (including C itself).

Re: I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

#39
post #24

>Objective-C was Apple’s response to object-oriented programming Apple's response? At its inception it had nothing to do with Apple and for a long time was the language of NeXT. It's only since OSX that Apple has adopted Objective-C.

NeXT bought Apple for minus US$400 million and renamed itself Apple ;-) Apple's CEO came from NeXT, as did their lead software architect. OSX is NeXT (ever wonder why so many things extend NSObject?).

FYI, NeXTs' CEO was Apple's CEO first. The parents point is correct.

Re: I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that.

#40
post #14

Would anyone care to comment on the state of Obj-C outside the Mac/iOS platforms? The impression I get from previous posts on this is that the utility of Obj-C is closely tied to the functionality provided by the (proprietary) Cocoa platform. Since there are so many developers from outside the Apple ecosystem learning Obj-C in order to develop for iOS, is there any signs of a movement in the other direction? Are deve…

For porting Cocoa apps to Windows, there's Cocotron: http://cocotron.org/
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