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Objective-C isn't what you think it is

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Re: Objective-C isn't what you think it is

#51

Post by nnq »

Touche wrote: post #15

> Objective-C isn't what you think it is A language without namespaces, that's used almost exclusively for iOS apps and nothing else. Nope, that's exactly what I think it is.

Yep. And the fact that Apple did absolutely nothing to evolve the language into something better shows that they just don't give a fuck about tools and most importantly about their developers! Maybe it's better than C++ or other alternative, maybe XCode is quite good, but this just show that since the days of NeXT (the 80s!), they just don't give a fuck!

...hate to say it, but nowadays the only big company that seems to care about developers and actually gives them cool tools and languages is Microsoft! C# with all its extensions, F# and the cool research they do in the languages area shows one thing: they care about us!

Re: Objective-C isn't what you think it is

#53

Post by Touche »

yulaow wrote: post #47
Touche wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, they're different things. My point is that seemingly no one uses Objective C except to make proprietary Apple things. Which is fine, but I always find it annoying when people sing the praises of Objective C but avoid using it for web servers, cli applications... or anywhere else Objective C doesn't have an institutional advantage. I think what people really like about Objective C is not Objective C but Cocoa.

It is called vendor lock-in. And yeah, it is not only Microsoft with their tecnologies that try/tried to do it.

It has nothing to do with lock-in. There's nothing stopping people from using Objective C to serve web apps, it's just that no one does it because Objective C is not a pleasant language to work in. People do choose to use Microsoft languages for things other than Windows apps.

Re: Objective-C isn't what you think it is

#55

Post by swift »

Pxtl wrote: post #29
stcredzero wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whichever kind you do, it just has to be optimized for reading the code, not be a leaky abstraction, and stay out of the way of debugging. Static meta programming can be bad in all these ways as well.

I've found that static metaprogramming produces an odd middle-ground. The intermediate code can be wonderfully legible and this lets you quickly find bugs... but when it comes time to fix the bug you have to go into the original generating code and then you find an absolute horror. In this case I'm referring to C# T4.

Visual Studio doesn't exactly treat T4 as a first-class language, which is a shame. Debugging it is much harder than it should be. I've found that it's frankly easier just to write your code generation in C# itself as an extra build phase.

Re: Objective-C isn't what you think it is

#56

Post by dhugiaskmak »

tambourine_man wrote: post #48

Dynamic method resolution isn’t the only superpower of *sick* mutable languages like Ruby and Objective-C I think he means slick , or the author has a funny sense of humor.

No, he means sick.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sick

(First definition.)

Re: Objective-C isn't what you think it is

#57

Post by allochthon »

When I first started toying around with Objective-C and got past the syntactic differences with Ruby, I was struck by how similar Ruby and Objective-C are, and concluded that they were clearly inspired by a common source (Smalltalk) or by one another or both. Although this kind of thing is no doubt mentioned in the Wikipedia articles, it was interesting to observe the commonalities firsthand and in context.

Re: Objective-C isn't what you think it is

#58

Post by program »

nnq wrote: post #51
Touche wrote: post #15

> Objective-C isn't what you think it is A language without namespaces, that's used almost exclusively for iOS apps and nothing else. Nope, that's exactly what I think it is.

Yep. And the fact that Apple did absolutely nothing to evolve the language into something better shows that they just don't give a fuck about tools and most importantly about their developers! Maybe it's better than C++ or other alternative, maybe XCode is quite good, but this just show that since the days of NeXT (the 80s!), they just don't give a fuck! ...hate to say it, but nowadays the only big company that seems…

On revision 2.0 and later Apple has included a lot of modern stuff like: ARC, properties, literals, blocks, fast enumeration, etc.

Re: Objective-C isn't what you think it is

#59

Post by austinz »

nnq wrote: post #51
Touche wrote: post #15

> Objective-C isn't what you think it is A language without namespaces, that's used almost exclusively for iOS apps and nothing else. Nope, that's exactly what I think it is.

Yep. And the fact that Apple did absolutely nothing to evolve the language into something better shows that they just don't give a fuck about tools and most importantly about their developers! Maybe it's better than C++ or other alternative, maybe XCode is quite good, but this just show that since the days of NeXT (the 80s!), they just don't give a fuck! ...hate to say it, but nowadays the only big company that seems…

This really isn't true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_c#Objective-C_2.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_c#Automatic_Reference... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_c#Blocks

Objective-C also suffers from C interop considerations that make it more difficult to extend and evolve the language than something like C# or Java.

(None of this is to denigrate the wonderful work MS has done when it comes to language innovation.)

Re: Objective-C isn't what you think it is

#60

Post by mwfunk »

nnq wrote: post #51
Touche wrote: post #15

> Objective-C isn't what you think it is A language without namespaces, that's used almost exclusively for iOS apps and nothing else. Nope, that's exactly what I think it is.

Yep. And the fact that Apple did absolutely nothing to evolve the language into something better shows that they just don't give a fuck about tools and most importantly about their developers! Maybe it's better than C++ or other alternative, maybe XCode is quite good, but this just show that since the days of NeXT (the 80s!), they just don't give a fuck! ...hate to say it, but nowadays the only big company that seems…

No, you don't "hate to say it".
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