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Brad Cox has died

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Re: Brad Cox has died

#91

Post by mucholove »

Two years ago I started writing an app in Swift. After a two year sabbatical, this was going to be my first app.

When using Swift, the compiler was painstakingly slow. Because of that, I tried Objective-C and it is so clear to me that I love it. It is the best language in my humble opinion. The dynamism clicked and the modern features make it a real breeze to use.

Messages are so flexible. I also love how it has “gradual typing.”

My only gripe with it is that Categories can’t formally conform to protocols—which I understand is an easy to build feature that Blaine Garst did finish but Apple never released.

I know I’m talking about the language more than I am talking about Brad Cox, but that’s because it’s the first time I really fell in love with a language. Using Objective-C to build it brings me joy. Lots and lots of joy.

Thank you Brad. My prayers to your family. May you find peace in heaven.

Re: Brad Cox has died

#92

Post by arthurofbabylon »

It’s odd to feel sad having never known this man, and only written in the language he helped create. Perhaps it is a testament to the beauty of Objective-C that I feel moved.

Objective-C is poetic. Its patterns and clarity are the closest I’ve come to an ecological software language: I feel like I’m gardening when writing Objective-C code.

Re: Brad Cox has died

#93

Post by userbinator »

bitexploder wrote: post #75
bartmika wrote: post #16

> 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,…

Coincidentally, I've been doing RE for many years, starting in the days of DOS and then moving into Windows, but it was only very recently --- less than a week ago --- that I had my first look at an app written in ObjC, and the first thing I noticed was the amount of information in the binary that seemed to almost give away most of its source: method, field, and class names everywhere. When I saw a method named something like checkLicenseSignature, I almost thought it was misdirection.

The second thing that I found astonishing was that these strings were actually being used by the runtime to determine what to call, i.e. something that in basically every other native language I've seen would be a direct or indirect call to an address or vtable offset. All this in an application that has no exported functions. I can definitely see how it would make RE extremely straightforward! Efficiency, on the other hand...

Re: Brad Cox has died

#94

Post by mucholove »

gdubs wrote: post #25

[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.

This is so poetic.

What a beautiful way to remember him.

Alan Kay once said that those who began to talk about objects in anthropomorphic terms got object oriented programming. Your “code” now reveals to me the cycle of life in all that I type. How delightful.

Thank you :)

Re: Brad Cox has died

#95

Post by [deleted] »

gigantor wrote: post #30

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…

[deleted]

Re: Brad Cox has died

#96

Post by saagarjha »

userbinator wrote: post #93
bitexploder wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Coincidentally, I've been doing RE for many years, starting in the days of DOS and then moving into Windows, but it was only very recently --- less than a week ago --- that I had my first look at an app written in ObjC, and the first thing I noticed was the amount of information in the binary that seemed to almost give away most of its source: method, field, and class names everywhere. When I saw a method named somet…

Objective-C, at least these days, is plenty fast, with a the cost of a message send being comparable to a virtual function call. The fast path of objc_msgSend is just over a dozen instructions.

Re: Brad Cox has died

#97

Post by thunderbong »

bartmika wrote: post #16

> 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".…

Not to sidetrack the conversation, but I found your typo of calling a drone an unmanned navel vehicle quite apt!

Re: Brad Cox has died

#98

Post by saagarjha »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #84
Klonoar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Verbose code is code you can come back to an understand years down the road. For ObjC, "verbose code" means "code you can come back to years down the road and hope there's still a manual to translate those message argument names into whatever current programming terminology uses".

Thankfully, in computer science terms like "array" and "string" still mean what they did many years ago.

Re: Brad Cox has died

#99

Post by devonkim »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #67
devonkim wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had known he was literally down the road from me I’d have tried to pay my respects earlier and didn’t catch this in local news at all. It’s not that bad here probably compared to 10 years ago, especially with the VRE train routes to DC and new stuff downtown.

I moved there in 1992 from Warrenton, predictably due to misfortune. Couldn't get out of Bobbitt-Land fast enough. Glad it's improved. Do city cops there still obsess over teen boy genitals? https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140709/07330027823/prose...

Manassas just elected its first Democrat mayor in like 100 years, for what it’s worth. The area isn’t as prosperous as the rest of NoVA but it’s kind of being forced to stop being looked at as a slum. Home prices YoY led the entire state this past year with the growth of remote employment. I know plenty of people still call it a NoVA ghetto similar to Herndon, but I’m happy to not be shielded from day to day reality for people that don’t have white collar jobs when I look outside my windows.

I can’t say much about law enforcement honestly one way or the other. Danica Roem won multiple elections here for focusing upon fixing the terrible traffic on 28, and it’s proof that local economic issues matter more than social issues now. The problems with that road have kept economic development from going to an otherwise welcoming community, and I blame that upon a laisse-faire style leadership for many decades that’s ironically impeded growth for the community long-term as AWS grew just down the road.

Re: Brad Cox has died

#100

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

saagarjha wrote: post #98
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Verbose code is code you can come back to an understand years down the road. For ObjC, "verbose code" means "code you can come back to years down the road and hope there's still a manual to translate those message argument names into whatever current programming terminology uses".

Thankfully, in computer science terms like "array" and "string" still mean what they did many years ago.

It's not about "array" or string".

     [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
   selector:@selector(appDidBecomeActive:)
   name:NSApplicationDidBecomeActiveNotification
   object:[NSApplication sharedApplication]];
can you explain to me what any of those terms mean without looking a fairly extensive reference manual?
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