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Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C

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Re: Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C

#61

Post by lolinder »

tialaramex wrote: post #49
Xeoncross wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be missing something here. "foo" + "bar"

While this syntax is indeed popular in several languages it's deeply weird , it's like how English uses apostrophe S to do two very different things at the end of words. The Add operation has a whole bunch of properties and this not only isn't most of them, it's arguably not any of them, the main argument for + as a string concatenate operator is "Well, people seem to like it". Which, I guess I/O streams doesn't even…

Whatever you feel about operator overloading, it's way better than the Objective-C version, even the version floated by the defenders. String interpolation is even better, sure, but the + alternative isn't that bad. As you noted, natural language does the same kind of overloading and we seem to cope with it just fine.

Re: Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C

#62

Post by astrange »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #55
hugey010 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never felt like this was too terrible... NSString* result = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ %@", @"Hello", @"World"];

I honestly can’t tell if the posts defending Objective C syntax are serious or not. Poe’s Law in action? Compare with "Hello " + "world" or if you hate operator overloading "{} {}".format("hello", "world") f"{foo} {bar}"

Your example is worse than stringWithFormat: for the same reason C++ iostreams are worse than format strings.

It's hard to control once you want anything more interesting than + and it's not localizable. Complaining that a function call's name is too long doesn't matter at all.

Re: Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C

#63

Post by astrange »

teakettle42 wrote: post #29
ardit33 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. But once you get some macros (or categories) then Objective-C becomes a great language. Is both elegant and very powerful as it is has the perfect balance between a static and a dynamic language. Swift on the other had is a language where wonks decided to throw every silly feature they thought off to the point that is becoming more complex than even Scala. I wished Swift was just a modernized Objective-C with…

> Swift on the other had is a language where wonks decided to throw every silly feature they thought off to the point that is becoming more complex than even Scala. What features in particular do you think represent unjustified complexity? Swift is not my favorite, but I wouldn’t consider it to be a “kitchen-sink” language, and it’s certainly less complicated than Scala.

"guard" is kind of useless but it's minor.

Re: Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C

#65

Post by zapzupnz »

mpweiher wrote: post #12
zapzupnz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m interested in this. What’s the developer experience like? Is there an LSP server to be able to use with VSCode?

While there is support for autocomplete in the Stsh framework (for the interactive shell, but you can use it independently), there is no LSP support yet. May I ask what you would be interested in doing with it?

I'm always interested in exploring different languages for teaching various computing concepts to my high school computer science students.

Re: Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C

#66

Post by zapzupnz »

astrange wrote: post #63
teakettle42 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Swift on the other had is a language where wonks decided to throw every silly feature they thought off to the point that is becoming more complex than even Scala. What features in particular do you think represent unjustified complexity? Swift is not my favorite, but I wouldn’t consider it to be a “kitchen-sink” language, and it’s certainly less complicated than Scala.

"guard" is kind of useless but it's minor.

`guard` has its time and place, which is to refactor pyramids of doom away. The number of nested `if let` statements I've seen, and written, is upsetting.

Re: Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C

#67

Post by nextos »

mpweiher wrote: post #2

Oh. Sorry, the website is currently not in a very good state. Feel free to ask any questions here. Note: very pleased that the box serving the site is pretty consistently at less than 1% CPU during the HN hug of death.

I agree with the Objective-S goals [1], and it is cool to see research in this direction.

Are the mechanisms for defining architectural styles and some predefined styles (OO call/return, pipes & filters, REST and event broadcast) all that is new from Objective-S? Any other future goals? These seem relatively easy to implement as e.g. Lisp macros? Clojure supports many of these.

Personally, I would like to see more research in program semantics. I think languages should try to reduce expressiveness whenever possible by offering mechanisms to do so, i.e. DSLs and DSL tools. Along with the total lack of popularity of design-by-contract / Hoare logic / refinement types, I think this is the biggest mistake in modern language design.

In other fields, engineers strive to use components and to combine them in ways that yield artifacts with provable properties. An elementary example of this are truss structures in mechanical engineering.

There is not that much research direction in this area. Personally, I like Dafny [2]. There is quite a lot of research on advanced type systems and theorem proving, but I think there is still a big gap in usability and automation. I think DSLs to restrict semantics + automated program analyses could be an excellent alternative. Infer [3] is pretty nice. Similar approaches that targeted a language with better semantics would be able to offer a lot more guarantees.

[1] http://objective.st/About

[2] https://github.com/dafny-lang/dafny

[3] https://fbinfer.com

Re: Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C

#68

Post by richarddaystrom »

mpweiher wrote: post #10
brtknr wrote: post #7

My two pence: It’s not a very sexy name for a language compared to the competition.

Yep. Still working on it. Suggestions?

Objective-See?

The tagline could be "Objective-See is like Objective-C without the C"

Re: Objective-S: architecture-oriented language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C

#69

Post by nightowl_games »

ardit33 wrote: post #11
Xeoncross wrote: post #3

I still remember my horror when I saw the pain of something as simple as string concatenation in Objective-C. The community literally has to write special micros to make joining a string palatable [1]. I salute the brave souls who made OSX/iOS apps before Swift. NSString *myString = @"Hello"; NSString *second = [myString stringByAppendingString:@" World"]; [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/510269/shortcuts-in-…

Agreed. But once you get some macros (or categories) then Objective-C becomes a great language. Is both elegant and very powerful as it is has the perfect balance between a static and a dynamic language. Swift on the other had is a language where wonks decided to throw every silly feature they thought off to the point that is becoming more complex than even Scala. I wished Swift was just a modernized Objective-C with…

Objective-C is powerful yes, but elegant? Not sure. It can do everything but I always felt like it was basically the opposite of elegant.
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