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Stanford Offers Cocoa Class

Posted by pudge on from the mmmm-cocoa dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Back in the early 90's Stanford University offered a class on Objective-C for students interested in writing applications for NeXTSTEP. After a long hiatus it appears that class will be offered again as CS193E, 'Object-oriented User Interface Programming.' It will be covering the Apple development tools, Objective-C, Foundation and AppKit, and Quartz. Any other schools out there planning or already offering Objective-C courses?"

11 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. textbooks? by TomSawyer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder if they'll be using O'Reilly's ADC blessed books for texts.

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    1. Re:textbooks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Possibly... but I would guess they'll just point to the O'Reilly books as extra resources.

      More likely they'll just have the instructor create specific handouts. That was how things were done when I was there... It is cheaper and a lot of times the handouts are better resources for the students as they also serve as notes for the lectures.

  2. Re:Strange by DLWormwood · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The object syntax using brackets instead of dots is apparently uncomprehendable to your average programmer.

    I don't know... C++ has some strange syntax and greater-than/less-than usage, especially when you get to using templates.

    Obj-C didn't take off because NeXT didn't take off. The only reason Obj-C is still being talked about is that Apple inherited it for the once and future Mac OS.

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  3. The markes selects AGAINST elegance by alispguru · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's called worse is better. Read it and weep.

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    To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
  4. This course is going to be online. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The link to scpd.stanford.edu means that the course will be available both online and on tv to all Stanford students and companies that pay for Stanford courses.

    I wonder if my expired stanford.edu account will let me in to view the courses?

  5. CMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    about 1 year ago(?), CMU started allowing students to teach their own courses. I took a cocoa programming course last semester.

  6. Re:Strange by jcr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd chalk that up to history. C++ was promulgated by Bell Labs, and you could get it for free from FSF.

    Objective-C was offered by a tiny software company called StepStone, and for the first couple of years, you had to either buy a NeXT computer for about five grand, or pay StepStone something like $500 for it.

    -jcr

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  7. Re:Slow Java by oscarmv · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's actually only the GUI that's quite slow (and it has improved lately since 1.4.1 got released for the mac and all that). Blame that on Aqua if you wish ;o)

    IIRC, pure number crunching Java benchmarks actually give good results (considering the hardware) compared to other platforms.

  8. Cocoa as a good tool for CS learning by oscarmv · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think no one has pointed this out, but IMHO Cocoa is a great environment (if not outright the best) to learn Object Oriented GUI programming. It tends not only to do things How They Should Be Done, but also gently enforce good practices.

    It's not like people doing CS courses don't use a number of tools they'll never use again after they get their degree (LISP compilers anyone? PROLOG? Obscure emulated environments? Did all those and more... learnt Cocoa in my free time, BTW).

    But in the interest of teaching good programming instead of "what's popular out there now" I'd rather have those coming behind me learning something like Cocoa and then adapting to Java or whatever (whose designed BTW is in many parts based on NextStep) than becoming klutzes with whatever has the greatest demand for code monkeys today.

    Just my .2

  9. Re:Strange by rixstep · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Thank you, jcr. It was Brad Cox who owned StepStone and who invented Objective-C, and didn't he patent the language?

    A lot of other companies didn't use it, what I understand, because they couldn't access it.

    What a shame...

  10. Great! But what about Newtonscript? by csoto · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's probably one of the best OOP environments yet developed. It would be a great intro to OOP. Too bad there's no real live platform on which to experiment.

    Talk of Newtonscript makes me think of soup, and now I'm hungry...

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