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The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

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Re: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

#31

Post by pjmlp »

bediger4000 wrote: post #26
pjmlp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One single NeXT workstation could buy a bunch of Windows 3.11 PCs, I know, my gradution thesis was porting software from Objective-C to C++, originall written on a Cube.

Immaterial with respect to judgements of Objective-C as a programming language. The cost of one single NeXT workstation could have bought a bunch of eggs, flour, sugar and milk to make pies and cakes, too.

You joke, but the price of the whole package is what dictactes buying decisions, not the greatness of Objective-C as programming language.

StepStone failed in the market, the authors moved into NeXT, and it isn't as if NeXT was doing that great, when Apple decided to acquire it.

Also lets not forget, during the early OS X days, Apple was so unsure Objective-C would be uptaken by the Mac OS developer community that they decided to ride the Java wave with their own implementation and JavaBridge.

Only after they saw Objective-C was being fully embraced by the developer community, did they drop their efforts to make Java a first party language on OS X development.

Personally I never liked having to type @ [] all over the place, even though I am a big Smalltalk fan, starting with Smalltalk/V for Windows 3.x.

And all the macros for basic types (YES, NO, BOOL, ...) always seemed a bit dirty way to achieve them, instead of the C++ way of having proper keywords.

Well, without Objective-C there would be no Java, nor C#, so there is that, as positive influence.

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

Re: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

#32

Post by KerrAvon »

Cold take: Objective-C was best appreciated by using Interface Builder back before iPhones, CoreAnimation, and autolayout. As Interface Builder became less useful and more painful, the dynamic nature of the language became a liability instead of an essential attribute.

Re: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

#33

Post by KerrAvon »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #21

A beautifully written piece. And to some degree I echo the sentiment as well. While I was never in search of the divine programming language , I too felt that as Objective-C was being sunset and Swift was in ascendency, perhaps it was my time to also step out of my career — sunset myself so to speak. Swift was something of a hard sell for me. It seem(s/ed) to borrow everything from every popular language allowing two…

C++ fits that description much more solidly than Swift IMHO. Every large C++ program is a dialect unto itself.

Re: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

#34

Post by jinwoo68 »

andsoitis wrote: post #24
jinwoo68 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously I misremembered. I just visited the site linked above. The company was "280 North"

Because you drive north on 280 from Cupertino to San Francisco…

Ah, their office was in SF? I just thought their office was near 280 :)

Re: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

#35

Post by jhatemyjob »

mistrial9 wrote: post #3

> Objective-C came up in the frenzied early days of the object-oriented programming era, and by all accounts, it should have never survived past it. this is deeply uninformed, with bald prejudice added.

Yeah it's pretty clear that whoever wrote that article has never heard of Alan Kay and upon reading this comment would fruitlessly attempt to use Google or ChatGPT to figure out why he is relevant in this context.

(Seriously, if you feel the temptation to do that, don't waste your time. You won't get the nice quick answer you want. A better use of your time would be trying to translate 間 into English.)

Re: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

#37

Post by jhatemyjob »

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #7

What a coincidence! I have been struggling to get Objective C going on Windows for a few days now to test out some ideas I had regarding a LINQ like language in C, and it' has been an ordeal. The only worthwhile runtime available (that doesn't depend of MinGW or some such) is libobjc2 from GNUstep. I decided to not use the full GNUstep Foundation since it is clearly bloated and reflects a very Java-esque sensibility…

> I decided to not use the full GNUstep Foundation

This is why it has been an ordeal. I came to a similar impasse. It went away when I changed my mind. It's a little bloated I'll give you that, but it's not that bad. Certainly better than bootstrapping 10+ years worth of language features

Re: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

#38

Post by HexDecOctBin »

jhatemyjob wrote: post #37
HexDecOctBin wrote: post #7

What a coincidence! I have been struggling to get Objective C going on Windows for a few days now to test out some ideas I had regarding a LINQ like language in C, and it' has been an ordeal. The only worthwhile runtime available (that doesn't depend of MinGW or some such) is libobjc2 from GNUstep. I decided to not use the full GNUstep Foundation since it is clearly bloated and reflects a very Java-esque sensibility…

> I decided to not use the full GNUstep Foundation This is why it has been an ordeal. I came to a similar impasse. It went away when I changed my mind. It's a little bloated I'll give you that, but it's not that bad. Certainly better than bootstrapping 10+ years worth of language features

> Certainly better than bootstrapping 10+ years worth of language features

That's the thing, I think ignoring those library features and rethinking the role of message passing OOP in plain C can actually lead to a much better language. But I do need a root class.

Re: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

#39

Post by pjmlp »

hgs3 wrote: post #11

It's a shame that Objective-C never really caught on outside of the NeXT/Apple ecosystem. User interfaces benefit greatly from dynamism, and all the UI toolkits I've used for C and C++ try to emulate message passing in one way or another: from WinAPI's SendMessage, to GTK and Qt's signals and slots. I'm surprised the wider FOSS community didn't adopt the language. I've been building a GTK4 app recently, and the macro…

It was an heavy influence on Java and related .NET ecosystem though.

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

Re: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

#40

Post by pjmlp »

pak9rabid wrote: post #28
hgs3 wrote: post #11

It's a shame that Objective-C never really caught on outside of the NeXT/Apple ecosystem. User interfaces benefit greatly from dynamism, and all the UI toolkits I've used for C and C++ try to emulate message passing in one way or another: from WinAPI's SendMessage, to GTK and Qt's signals and slots. I'm surprised the wider FOSS community didn't adopt the language. I've been building a GTK4 app recently, and the macro…

Good 'ol GNUStep. I think the only thing I ran that relied on it was WindowMaker, which was an excellent, minimalistic window manager back in the day.

WindowMaker and AfterStep never had any dependencies to GNUStep.

They were often used together though.

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