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Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C

joshsymonds.com

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Re: Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C

#41

Post by cageface »

mattetti wrote: post #5

I wrote a somewhat more balanced review based on my experience with RubyMotion over the last few months (beta testing) http://merbist.com/2012/05/04/macruby-on-ios-rubymotion-revi...

While RubyMotion is by far, the best alternative to Objective-C but it is hard to tell 48 hours after its release what people will do with it.

What about MonoTouch? To be honest I think I'd look at that first if I wanted something other than Obj-C. At least I could take my non-UI code and run it on Android.

Re: Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C

#43

Post by pazimzadeh »

Isn't RubyMotion always going to lag behind Objective-C in terms of implementing any new features by Apple?

In the same vein that allowing Flash and C# toolkits above Cocoa Touch would slow the adoption new features (http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_...).

Re: Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C

#44

Post by cageface »

tommy_m wrote: post #37

In my opinion lot of these threads completely miss the point of a tool like RubyMotion. It isn't about which solution is "better"...it is about ease of use for the large number of people that already know Ruby, and want to leverage that knowledge into exploring IOS development. Not everyone has the time or inclination to learn Objective-C right now, even though we can all agree that learning other languages is a good…

As many other posters have noted, learning Obj-C is about 5% of the battle. Getting to grips with the APIs is the hard part and you have to learn them whether you decide to use Obj-C, RubyMotion or MonoTouch.

So if you think that Ruby is providing you with a significant shortcut here you're in for some disappointment.

Re: Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C

#45

Post by peterjs »

I've been programming a 3D application in Objective-C for a few months. There are things I like, dislike and find really confusing about the language. The thing is, you have to learn and understand it before making assumptions based on "hello world"-like pieces of code. The best "feature" I found so far is not even a feature. It is the way the language is designed simultaneously with the framework/os. It feels more compact and makes reasoning about programs easier.

The second is the way in which complex applications are built. Some programming languages are known for having many design patterns around them, which often feel artificial. Objective-C and the Cocoa libraries use only a handful of them, but they come very natural.

Re: Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C

#46

Post by stcredzero »

This is the power of Ruby + Objective-C: you get Ruby’s powerful and expressive enumerators, metaprogramming, and reflection, but Objective-C’s APIs and libraries. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter, they just go together so well.

Not the best researched sentence. Much of this is possible in RubyMotion because of Objective-C's metaprogramming and reflection and other powerful features. This makes me suspect the author's depth of knowledge of Objective-C. That said, he's right that Objective-C has a lot more syntactic noise than more recent languages like Ruby and Python.

Re: Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C

#47

Post by RandallBrown »

Yarnage wrote: post #23

>>>Don’t get me wrong, Objective-C is better than C or C++, but I don’t think that’s saying a whole lot. Objective-C better than C++? Wow, has this person ever used Objective-C and C++?

Do you really like C++ better than Objective-C? I've been writing both for the past few years and I have to say I greatly prefer Objective-C.

Re: Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C

#48

Post by EternalFury »

Why would you say it's better than Objective-C? Since anything it can do has to exist in the Objective-C framework offered by Apple, it is probably equivalent.

Also, let's not forget 90% of things that make money in the App Store are games. RubyMotion doesn't seem to do much to help you with that.

In other words, for Rubyists, RubyMotion is a thin wrapper around Objective-C classes that feels like home. For everyone else, it's an added layer that provides a thin sugar coating and not much else.

Re: Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C

#49

Post by stcredzero »

Derbasti wrote: post #17
mistercow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well see part of the problem is that it takes more experience to know your way around C++; it's just bigger than Objective-C, even if you only talk about the "commonly used" parts. If you know C and are reasonably familiar with OO, you can easily learn all of the important differences between C and Objective-C in a week or so. And since it's a true superset, everything you know from C carries over. C++ is just more c…

Exactly. C++ is simply way more complicated than Obj-C. Also, the Obj-C object system is pretty high level and dynamic (message passing, late binding, dynamic dispatch). This makes it somewhat slower at method calling, but at the same time a lot easier to work with. The downside of being slow is usually mitigated by simply being able to drop back to plain old C if need be. Of course, C++ can emulate all that, and wit…

C++ is simply way more complicated than Obj-C.

Also, Obj-C is somewhat more complicated than Ruby, though there is a lot of Ruby if you go looking. Obj-C is also more syntactically noisy than Ruby.

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