Allah I Rahmou
Hope i can achieve contributions like his in my lifetime.
Brad Cox has died
71–80 of 197 posts
Re: Brad Cox has died
#72What an amazing career. I was curious about this: >"The late Steve Jobs', NeXT, licensed the Objective-C language for it's new operating system, NEXTSTEP. NeXT eventually acquired Objective-C from Stepstone." Does anyone what NeXT paid to acquire the Objective-C license?
They were both privately held companies, so it might never have been disclosed.
Part of the acquisition was that NeXT would license Objective-C back to Stepstone for their own products, so it was more than an outright purchase anyway.
Re: Brad Cox has died
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Objective-C is verbose not just because of the NS suffixes. Everything is verbose (by today standards anyway). ObjC is a "child" of the 1980's when verbosity was considered a merit and a norm in programming. Two things that I used to like about it: - Combination of static typing and at the same time pretty high level dynamic typing: it was practically possible to call any method on any object, right or wrong, just li…
> ObjC is a "child" of the 1980's when verbosity was considered a merit and a norm in programming. It's still considered a merit by some.
I agree with this. Verbose code is code you can come back to an understand years down the road.
The easiest projects for me to pick back up are the ones I wrote in Objective-C, hands down.
Re: Brad Cox has died
#74I am giving a talk in work soon around method swizzling in iOS and was delving into the history of Objective-C a bit and came across Alan Kay's talk about the power of simplicity and how we've all screwed up OOP. In the talk, Alan talks about the ant who lives his life on a single plane of existence, the "Gulley World" or "Reality". The ant goes to work, he finds stuff to eat, he lives his life in this Gulley World,…
"I think Alan's idea of OOP was something more fluid, more organic than this."
I've heard a good deal about Alan Kay's dissent of the state of OOP, but I've never seen a concise summary of his vision or the principles that Kay's 'ideal' realization of OOP would adhere to.
Does such a resource exist, written by Kay himself or otherwise? Or do I just need to go play around with Obj C or Smalltalk to really "get it?"
Re: Brad Cox has died
#75> On one scuba diving excursion while in the compound having lunch, Brad engaged a couple from Germany in conversation. Brad asked about the fellow travelers occupation and discovered he was a computer programmer. Lifewise, Brad was asked about his life's work and stated I am also a computer programmer. "What do you do?" Brad was asked. I wrote Objective-C. Astonished, the gentlerman said, "No, Brad Cox wrote that".…
Objective-C is a real object oriented programming language. Everything is messages. Reverse engineering ObjC as a security engineer over the years has been a treat. The runtime is a breeze to work with and the language itself made substantial usability improvements over C. It’s phased out over Swift now, but I really have no complaints over my time with the language, a rare thing in tech. I didn’t know you, Mr. Cox, but I enjoyed your work.
Re: Brad Cox has died
#76I am giving a talk in work soon around method swizzling in iOS and was delving into the history of Objective-C a bit and came across Alan Kay's talk about the power of simplicity and how we've all screwed up OOP. In the talk, Alan talks about the ant who lives his life on a single plane of existence, the "Gulley World" or "Reality". The ant goes to work, he finds stuff to eat, he lives his life in this Gulley World,…
"I think Alan's idea of OOP was something more fluid, more organic than this." I've heard a good deal about Alan Kay's dissent of the state of OOP, but I've never seen a concise summary of his vision or the principles that Kay's 'ideal' realization of OOP would adhere to. Does such a resource exist, written by Kay himself or otherwise? Or do I just need to go play around with Obj C or Smalltalk to really "get it?"
Here he discusses his thoughts on the term; http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...
Re: Brad Cox has died
#77Oral History of Brad Cox
Re: Brad Cox has died
#78 - (void) dealloc
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}Re: Brad Cox has died
#79My first programming job used Objective C to make an iOS app. Back in 2013 XCode was pretty fast. My naive youthful self enjoyed using Objective C's Categories and Associated Objects to share some UI code across 2 UIViewControllers.
Did I get it to work? yep. Did it make senior programmers a bit nervous? yep. I wrote a blog post about it.
Later, I got to use Java for some Android apps, and after that we got Swift. XCode seemed to get slower with swift and Java(android) was more a limited language. No complaints, but it was just not as fun and easy as using Objective C. (in my naive beginner opinion)
Things were a lot simpler back then. I'll never forget my joy learning Objective C at my first ever programming job. RIP Brad Cox
Re: Brad Cox has died
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the context of the time, C++ didn't exist yet. Objective-C was actually introduced just prior to C++, and both languages were effectively solving the same problem in different ways: C was the dominant language, and both language designers were trying to graft the OOP paradigm onto it. Objective-C is a thin-layer on top of C, adding Smalltalk-inspired object support. That's pretty much all there is to it. C, with s…
I'm curious--what happened to Objective-C in that fight with C++? Why didn't people go for its simplicity?
Objective C loses to C++ for performance if you really start exploiting OOP a lot. The fact the you can swizzle methods in ObjC says a lot about the "weight" of the underlying implementation ("it's all messages") compared to C++.