Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently the disconnect here comes because you think of a language as trivial (as compared to an API), however it's often hard to separate the language (syntax, and its built in methods), and the libraries which make up an API/standard library. In addition to the cost of learning a library/language, there is also a day to day cost in using it - a certain friction which encourages you to take some paths and not othe…
I don't understand how this relates to anything I've said. How is this meant to show that the time it would take to learn Objective-C while you're learning Cocoa is prohibitive? Actually, I think your code examples support my point. You're not contrasting Ruby and Objective-C, you're contrasting Ruby's standard library with the Objective-C library Foundation, which is what you need to learn to get any real use out of…
The example was supposed to illustrate that some things are easier and more concise in ruby, and thus also presumably in something like Rubymotion. The relevance to your posts is that you are ignoring some very good reasons to use ruby in your focus on the cocoa api - not all programming in ios consists of calls to the api so learning it is not the only thing required to make an iPhone app. In some apps api calls might make up half of the code, with the rest being back-end stuff. Evidently Rubymotion does not mean you can avoid learning the api, it just helps you write the rest of your code in a preferred language while painlessly calling the apis to show stuff on the screen. Not having to deal with Xcode would be a bonus too.