41–50 of 197 posts
This is Apple Objective-C right? I thought it was developed in house, didn't realize it had already existed.
Many moons ago I used to work with Brad in DC. He never let on that he was a world famous computer scientist. He slinged code shoulder to shoulder with us plebes. He was a Mensch.
There is no doubting the legacy of Objective-C (especially given the high likelihood you are reading this post on a mobile device, using app written in Objective-C), but to truly appreciate Brad's legacy, am curious about the appeal of using Objective-C. Having developed only one small iOS app with Objective-C code, I was mostly turned off by its overall verbosity in the context of NS prefixes. Hence, I ask the quest…
Many moons ago I used to work with Brad in DC. He never let on that he was a world famous computer scientist. He slinged code shoulder to shoulder with us plebes. He was a Mensch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heck, many mixed-signal ICs are much harder to use correctly than a typical object; Things like "Vdd must be brought up to +6V or higher before CLK begins toggling" are not too uncommon to see.
It's a loose analogy. You're going to find exceptions. I think its a fantastic analogy to describe what a class is despite of some exceptions.
[BradCox release] RIP. I owe so much to Objective-C. My early love for the language is what launched my own career, and inspired a love for programming in general. Thank you, Brad Cox.
One day, with the help of another student, I managed to install Snow Leopard on my Acer notebook and the first thing I wanted to do was figure out how iPhone programming worked. However I was instantly confused at the syntax of the language and that threw me off.
I did try again two more times though, and in the last one it just clicked. That was mid-2012. I dropped out of university for a job opportunity in 2015 and have been an iPhone developer ever since.
Thank you, Brad Cox.
Many moons ago I used to work with Brad in DC. He never let on that he was a world famous computer scientist. He slinged code shoulder to shoulder with us plebes. He was a Mensch.
For the other Dutch/German people out there confused at what Mensch means other than 'human', dictionary says: "a person of integrity and honor" ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mensch )
Very sad. I had the privilege of taking a class from him at George Mason University, and he was (unsurprisingly) very knowledgeable. He worked hard to enable software reuse. No one was interested in his idea of trying to monitor component use during runtime to pay developers. That was an unworkable approach, and I told him that then. But the general world of making it easy to reuse components is a reality today, via…
> No one was interested in his idea of trying to monitor component use during runtime to pay developers. This reminds me of Project Xanadu's ideas about transclusions and associated royalties. What a coincidence that this was posted recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25875386
In addition, the telecomms were generally not interested in the very early Internet (TCP/IP) because they couldn't figure out how to do per-packet metering, and they assumed that was necessary.
All 3 examples show that trying to do fine-grained metering, in ways that cause tremendous overhead, often don't work. It is sometimes better to make something so that it is "too cheap to meter".
There is no doubting the legacy of Objective-C (especially given the high likelihood you are reading this post on a mobile device, using app written in Objective-C), but to truly appreciate Brad's legacy, am curious about the appeal of using Objective-C. Having developed only one small iOS app with Objective-C code, I was mostly turned off by its overall verbosity in the context of NS prefixes. Hence, I ask the quest…
This is actually a blessing because NS-/name prefixes are a simple approach to naming that keeps you humble. If you let programmers have namespacing they will invent enterprise software frameworks where every class is six layers deep in a namespace of random tech buzzwords they thought up.
> Hence, I ask the question on behalf myself and others who did not appreciate the language and did not give it a proper chance... what did I miss and what are its top appeals?
It implements message-based programming, which is "real" OOP and more powerful than something like C++, where OOP just means function calls where the first parameter goes to the left of the function name instead of the right.
In particular it implements this pattern: https://wiki.c2.com/?AlternateHardAndSoftLayers which is great for UI programming and lets you define the UI in data rather than code. Although iOS programmers seem to like doing it in code anyway.