It's not that bad. A little verbose, but it's not like switching from C to Lisp or Prolog.
Why Objective-C is Hard
51–60 of 156 posts
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#52I 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…
Why does a comment about Apple's documentation need to turn into a holy war versus Android? The parent said that Apple "could improve" their documentation, not that it was worse than Google/Microsoft/IBM/whomever.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#53I 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…
Dispatch queues have made most of my concurrency woes go away; same thing with ARC for memory leaks.
A word of caution with ARC -- you still have to release certain things manually, for example CGImageRefs with CFRelease if you're doing any sort of image manipulation.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#54You had met at "... like broccoli or sexual intercourse". Great read, well written.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#55You know what I really dislike about Objective-C is that is really inconsistent with properties and messages, at one point I said out loud: JUST PICK ONE! Coming from Python this is a big thing for me, I like when there's only one right way to do things. P.S. My only experience with Objective-C is with the iOS SDK.
You may already know this, but properties are just sugar for messages and instance variables. Their only difference is a shorter syntax.
(...plus some extra runtime data, but you don't usually notice that.)
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#56People 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 ab…
I couldn't agree more.
Everything is "hard" on the first couple of times, but the only recommendation I say to people is to stop worrying about the language, and go create stuff, get into that mindset of creating something, even if it's just a simple app. that will allow us to research and ask things around, and that's when you learn and progress. Nobody achieves anything by bitching around how hard this and that is.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#57What lots of others have already mentioned.
Also be aware, there is something called "Objective-C++" which is a superset of C++.
The syntax is not "weird" unless you just don't know the language. Acclimation is part of the learning process.
In my opinion, the syntax/language is pretty great. I enjoy ObjC greatly. My main beef with it is that it's less than portable. ObjFW attempts to solve this, and is a phenomenal framework already.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#58I love the flexibility and breadth of things you can do with objective-c/c++. It's downsides mostly come from syntax, container class getting/setting is way too verbose, same with string operations. If there was a special syntax for just string and container classes, large swaths of my code would be smaller.
UIKit view controller classes are also not flexible enough, and crap out in a lot of custom multithreaded operations when they shouldn't. I could reproduce the same behavior with my own classes (animations, transitions, view control, etc) using just basic UIView classes and it would work significantly better.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#59I 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…
Comparing any other documentation to Googles is just too easy since Google is generally very poor. IMHO, the best documentation out there is still MSDN. Apple's documentation is fine, but still not up to MSDN level IMHO.
Re: Why Objective-C is Hard
#60Forget the fact that we're not even talking about methods, really, we're talking about messages (a distinction I'm not going to make) and you refer to selectors like the one above as performAction:withTwoParameters:. Most people don't care anymore.
Well, those people have fairly low expectations of themselves then. People say this bullshit about the supposedly strange Obj-C syntax, whereas the part that it's not C is basically 99% "Smalltalk in square brackets". Nobody complains that Smalltalk has a strange syntax, even small kids seem to use Squeak just fine.
[object performAction: param1 withTwoParameters: param2]
not that different to:
object.performAction(self, param1, withTwoParameters=param2)
in Python, or any language with named parameters. The syntactic differences are superficial. You don't even have to know about selectors and messages to understand the gist of what that invocation will do. "OMG, method parameters have a name" --well, big effin' deal.
Ever seen C++ (especially the recent standard)? Or the beast with 1000 features C# has become? Obj-C compared is leanness personified.
The ACTUAL source of complexity in programming in Objective-C is the huge Cocoa (et al) API. But a huge API, especially nicely documented as Cocoa is, and with such breadth and nice MVC design, is a GOOD THING.
This tightly-coupled codesign is unique to Objective-C. There are other languages that run on .Net, such as Iron Python. Lots of language use the JVM besides Java, like Clojure. Even Ruby and Rails are two distinct entities and projects. The only significant effort to use a different language with Cocoa/Cocoa Touch and the Objective-C runtime, Mac Ruby, was a project largely backed by Apple before they abandoned it.
Actually, there are several efforts besides MacRuby to use another language with the Objective-C runtime: Nu (Lisp like), F-script (Smalltalk like). But the main difference here is that the Objective-C runtime is a very simple runtime, not a full VM, so the comparison to CLR and Java is not that apt. For one, CLR was designed from the start to support multiple languages, and Java didn't have any major language targeting the VM until like 2004-5.
In general, not that good of an article...