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> [[those squareBrackets] lookInsane:YES]. Nah, they are perfectly sane. They look like little ASCII envelopes because that's exactly the metaphor. Square brackets send messages.
At this point in my career, I can't go back to a language that doesn't have support for Optionals or compiler validation of nullable types. I can sacrifice async or fancy stream apis, but I will never go back to chasing null pointer exceptions on a daily basis.
> [[those squareBrackets] lookInsane:YES]. Nah, they are perfectly sane. They look like little ASCII envelopes because that's exactly the metaphor. Square brackets send messages.
They're function calls right? I can't square the "message passing" conceit (implying putting message objects on queues, dequeuing etc) with the claim that Obj-C is just C with some extra stuff.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ObjectiveC/objc_ms...
At this point in my career, I can't go back to a language that doesn't have support for Optionals or compiler validation of nullable types. I can sacrifice async or fancy stream apis, but I will never go back to chasing null pointer exceptions on a daily basis.
I really miss Objective-C, and in the world of Swift craziness [1] I'm reminded often of this blog post [2] wondering what would have happened if Apple hadn't encountered Second System Syndrome for its recommended language. (There's a decent argument it encountered it in iOS and macOS too.) [1] https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... -- apologies to the authors, but even as a previous C++ guy,…
> [[those squareBrackets] lookInsane:YES]. Nah, they are perfectly sane. They look like little ASCII envelopes because that's exactly the metaphor. Square brackets send messages.
They're function calls right? I can't square the "message passing" conceit (implying putting message objects on queues, dequeuing etc) with the claim that Obj-C is just C with some extra stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're function calls right? I can't square the "message passing" conceit (implying putting message objects on queues, dequeuing etc) with the claim that Obj-C is just C with some extra stuff.
Absolutely not. It only sends a message. The receiver doesn't have to have a corresponding method and can do with that message what it will. Objective-C is a 'true' object-oriented language, like Smalltalk.
I guess Simula, which is older than Smalltalk, doesn't get a say.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely not. It only sends a message. The receiver doesn't have to have a corresponding method and can do with that message what it will. Objective-C is a 'true' object-oriented language, like Smalltalk.
> a 'true' OOP language, like Smalltalk. I guess Simula, which is older than Smalltalk, doesn't get a say.
I have never programmed in ObjC but was curious to learn how it works, and so I decided to write a ObjC runtime [0]. It took less than 2000 lines, and a large number of them are comments. Now I wonder how easy would it be to do dome lispy symbolic computing in it. Maybe something like a Prolog.
[0] https://gist.github.com/namandixit/76cd084676acdf16cfd014cbb...
You can reach into built-in components and precisely modify just what you want while keeping everything else platform-native and without having to reimplement everything. I've never seen anything like this before, anywhere. Maybe OLE on Windows wanted to be this (I've seen similar capabilities in REALLY OLD software written around OLE!) but the entirety of Windows' interface and shell and user experience was never unified on OLE so its use was always limited to something akin to a plugin layer. (In WordPad, for example)
The only thing that even seems reminiscent is maybe Android Studio, and maybe some "cross-platform" toolkits that are comparatively incredibly immature in other areas. But Android Studio is so largely intolerable that I was never able to dig very far into its debugging capabilities.
I feel like I must be in some sort of honeymoon phase but I 100% completely understand now why many Mac-native apps are Mac-native. I tried to write a WinUI3 app a year or two ago and it was a terrible experience. I tried to get into Android app development some years ago and it was a terrible experience. Writing GUIs for the Linux desktop is also a terrible experience. But macOS? I feel like I want to sleep with it, and I weep for what they've done with liquid glass. I want the perfection that led to Cocoa and all its abstractions. Reading all the really, super old documentation that explains entire subsystems in amazingly technical depth makes me want to SCREAM at how undocumented, unpolished and buggy some of the newer features have gotten.
I've never seen documentation anything like that before, except for Linux, on Raymond Chen's blog, and some reverse-engineering writeups. I do love Linux but its userspace ecosystem just is not for me.
Maybe this is also why Smalltalk fiends are such fans. I should really get into that sometime. Maybe Lisp too.