is it fair to TL;DR this as "Objective-C is only hard if you've never used Smalltalk"? or is that overly glib?
Why Objective-C is Hard
41–50 of 156 posts
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#42People fret over language syntax too much. In most sane languages including Objective-C you simply forget about the syntax after a few months. What’s much more important is the conceptual complexity: the number of language features and the way they fit together. A second important thing is the standard library. Objective-C is a pleasant language by both these metrics, since there are just a few language constructs above the C level, they fit together well without creating dark corners, and Cocoa is a very mature and well thought-out framework. The iOS Objective-C ecosystem does take some time to master, but so does every modern SDK, since the libraries are always huge. Programming is hard and if somebody is scared by minus signs in front of method names, evil spirits will suck his soul out by the time he gets to thread synchronization.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#43I spend half my day in iOS development and the other half on a Java web stack. I love the RESULT of Obj-C+Cocoa Touch, you can achieve amazing user experience. But I'm reaching the point thinking: it's 2012, I'm an application developer, why am I spending half my time debugging memory leaks and concurrency issues? Java isn't much better either, why all this boiler plate, and still concurrency nightmares. I've done a…
To me, this is almost like asking, "Why, since it is 2012, is the Halting Problem, such a problem?" I don't know what 2012 has to do with functional programming languages, though ... seems like there was this language a long, long time ago, in a far away land ...
What made Clojure stick out for me was its easy access to the vast java libs, and its philosophy on concurrency. Both (I could be very wrong) seemed novel in the functional world.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#44I might be just me, but I've always found Objective-C's syntax very nice (compared to, say, C++).
It might be verbose, but you have a clear separation between C and Objetive-C. If it doesn't contain "[]" or "@", my brain can just parse it as C code.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#45I find Objective-C hard as well, but it has more to do with the nature of the message passing syntax that objective-c has.
For instance, for the life of me I CANNOT get calls to NSNotificationFactory right the first try, and there are no compiler hint to help you...it just doesn't work for some reason.
There are other items like that. Not much help when the app crashes, lack of Namespaces (class name collisions), etc.
Then throw in all the fun of submitting an app to the store. Working with iAds and In App Purchases will make you want to hurt something.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#46Pretty great article. Though I wish someone could point to the paper or whatever that explains the philosophy of Objective-C having insanely verbose method and parameter names. Like, readable is one thing, but they always end up like stringFromAppendingThingToThingToNumberYieldingThingThx and it becomes unimaginable to use Objective-C without XCode to autocomplete the other 40 characters.
It's because Objective-C methods are named according to the nouns that they return rather than the verbs they perform. For example, "[input stringByAppendingThing:thing]" rather than "input.append(thing)". Methods are actions, not objects, so the most concise description for a method is usually a verb. Describing it as a noun instead requires adding prepositions and turning verbs to the gerund '-ing' form. I realized…
Interesting observation. It is called "Object"ive for a reason :)
I wonder if we can relate your observation to the fact that "messages" (nouns) are preferred to "methods" (verbs) in Obj-C.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#47I don't think Objective-C is hard at all. If you understand OO or come from a OO language you can pick it up pretty fast, like in a day or two. Cocoa on the other hand requires much more learning curve. Also apple could improve their documentation. I'm currently working on a OSX app, and Objective-C has been a breeze, with the new ARC is even more easy to work with.
Really? If you compare Apple's documentation to Android's...they're worlds apart. Here's a good example: I'm an iOS developer, and have been since pretty much day 1 of the platform. I recently actually started playing around with the Android SDK, and environment. I followed Google's supplied tutorial for creating a tabbar app, and asked one of the Android devs who works with me to come take a look at the finished res…
I never really worked with Android so I can't speak for it.
But I completely agree with you on the updated documentation, I just feel that sometimes I get a little lost when I trying to learn how to use a class or framework.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually find it much harder to read as a result of it's verbosity. For example, just yesterday I ran into a bug with these 2 lines: if ([[data objectForKey:@"released"] isKindOfClass:[NSNull class]]) { if ([[data objectForKey:@"posterUrl"] isKindOfClass:[NSString class]]) { They weren't right next to each other, and at a glance, I misread to assume they were doing the same thing. There's too much shit in the way o…
I've found after a while you get really used to the verbosity. I miss it when I return to other languages. For instance, I look at the first example you posted and I know exactly what it does. It's very natural for me to read.
Is it really easier than `data['poster_url'].is_a? String`? I wouldn't call the Objective-C example unreadable, but it's certainly a lot more line noise for not a lot more meaning.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#49Hard is OK. Over time, you become better at it, until it's no longer a problem -- it's a relative thing. Not saying easy is bad, but hard isn't _that_ big of a problem.
Example: I find Russian very hard to speak. That doesn't mean Russian IS hard, I just don't know russian. And some languages are harder (more stuff to learn) than others.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#50I'm going to disagree. Objective-C is an ASNI C derivative language. Programming for me at least isn't knowing the syntaxual elements of a language but leveraging paradigms I know to exist from one language to the next. Objective-C while looks different, is really no different than most languages. It definitely shouldn't be your first language, maybe not even your 2nd choice, but if you have a conceptional knowledge of programming languages and you're keen on diving into the deep end, there's enough resources out there you're not going to drown. I love Objective-C for many reasons, but then again I equate programmatic choice to personalities. If that makes sense. Point being, don't be deterred. iOS SDK is something else all together, but like anything worth learning, learn by doing.
What you should probably decide for yourself is if this article makes it seem harder than it is. His conclusion about Automatic Reference Counting is on the money, but that's about it.
"When learning Objective-C, it's not just a language or a framework or a runtime or a compiler, it's all of these things". No is not. These are different.
If anyone is considering learning this language, there's a bunch of unsolved problems that frequently include writing new libraries.
Cheers.