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What do you think about Objective-C?

 
clojure forum advocate
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Hey,
I got "Learn Objective-C on the Mac" and I will start reading it very soon.
What do you thing in Objective-C in general?
Is it a decent, well-designed and elegant language?
Do you have fun writing Objective-C code? or it is boring like writing in C (at least to me)?
Would you please share your opinion?
Thanks.
 
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John Todd wrote:Hey,
I got "Learn Objective-C on the Mac" and I will start reading it very soon.
What do you thing in Objective-C in general?
Is it a decent, well-designed and elegant language?
Do you have fun writing Objective-C code? or it is boring like writing in C (at least to me)?
Would you please share your opinion?
Thanks.



It has some really nice features and some pain in the butt features. ;)

It is just another language.

Mark
 
Hussein Baghdadi
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Objective-C looks to me a low level language, just like C.
I'm not in a position allows me to talk about it but I don't think it has abstractions we find in Java or Scala.
Pointers and manual memory management, it is easy to shot oneself in the foot.
 
Hussein Baghdadi
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BTW, do you have a recommendation for Objective-C book?
I'm considering these:
Learn Objective-C for Java Developers
Learn Objective-C on the Mac
 
Mark Spritzler
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John Todd wrote:BTW, do you have a recommendation for Objective-C book?
I'm considering these:
Learn Objective-C for Java Developers
Learn Objective-C on the Mac



Objective-C to me is not low level, there are many abstractions in the language and in libraries/frameworks that are out there. The amount of code I need to write is still very small in comparison to really having to write low level code.

I got the Apress iPhone development book and the one buy Wesley Addison, but the first version that covered 2.x.

I never got a book that was just "objective-C"

Mark
 
Hussein Baghdadi
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Java eliminates many headaches like signed and unsigned types, on the other hands they are essential parts in Objective-C.
This is why I got the feeling I'm moving to a low level language.
Of course, no one is forcing me to learn Objective-C, I just have a couple of impressions about it.
Maybe after I become familiar with it I will appreciate it.
 
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I have briefly looked at it and also got a book about Objective-C since I got a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

The syntax for calling methods on objects looks totally alien. Instead of object.method(arguments) it looks something like [object method name:value]. This strange syntax comes from Smalltalk and is totally different from more conventional languages such as Java or C++.

It looks like a strange version of C with strange Smalltalk syntax that doesn't really fit with the rest of the language. There's garbage collection, but not always (I think that on the iPhone there's no garbage collection). It is a low-level language, with pointers and manual memory management.
 
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I haven't done much with it, but I liked it. As Mark said, there are pros and cons, like any language. Some things are cumbersome, others straight forward.

Xcode and Cocoa make it fun.
 
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When I was talking to Brad Cox, who invented it, he said that it was as much like C as it could be, to ease acceptance by the programming community. This was, of course, back in the 80s. It was an attempt to add OO functions of Smalltalk to a C-like language. Without breaking the brains of C programmers.

The biggest proponents of Objective-C were the folks at Next/NextStep, Job's first post-Apple company. They did all their cool UI stuff in it. And of course, NextStep is the soul of OS-X, the software the allowed Apple to stay competitive enough to invent the iPod and iPhone.
 
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