Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs thinks Objective C is Perfect?
josht writes "Nitesh Dhanjani has posted an e-mail thread between Steve Jobs and himself. Dhanjani argues "I'd like to see Apple developers gain more choice. With every iteration of OSX, there seems to be so much effort put into innovation of desktop components, but the development environment is age old." I agree with Dhanjani. What has Apple done recently to wow the developers, and make it fun to code Cocoa components? I've looked into the Objective C and Xcode environment but compared to Microsoft's .NET solutions, it doesn't impress me at all. I think Apple can do a lot better. Steve Jobs disagrees. What do the readers think about Objective C and Xcode?"
It is a really outdated 'language' today compared to Java, C#, and even C++.
If you look closly to objective C, it is really not a language, it is just C with a enhanced macro pre processor.
Performance is ABYSMAL compared to any modern language because message sends (the objective C equiv of a method call) has to go through a dispatch map. This is how it works:
1: you send a message to an object like [anObject doSomething]; this sends the doSomething message to the anObject object.
2: under the covers, this calls a function called regular function called objc-msg-send, this is part of the Objective C runtime.
3: this function looks up the object, then looks up the dispatch table to see if if can accept this message, then finally invokes it.
Overall, objective c message call performance is comparable to Javascript.
Now, of course you can just call C functions, but then what is the point of objective C?
Modern languages like Java, C# provide all the dynamsism of objective C, but do it effciently thougth vtables and reflection.
For a while I thought about porting some software we have to the Apple platform (it is currently written in C#), but with the abysmal performance of Objective C, the portion of the app turned out to be not usable (this is a parser that needs to make several thousand method calls per second). We ended up porting it to Java, and performance was a bit better than the original C# version.
So, while Objective C was a neat idea in the 80's, it is time to move on Apple.
Objective C was a great idea in the 80's but it is time to move on. Steve Jobs, why don't you try some Java?
Use Qt and STFU. Qt is available on all major platforms natively and that includes MAC.
Use GNUStep and STFU. GNUstep is available on all the major platforms natively, and MAC users can use Cocoa.
It makes C++ development completely pain free
Nothing can make C++ development pain free. Not with four casts, operator and function overloading, and templates.
By the way, Qt isn't written in C++, and doesn't make it easy to write in C++- it makes you write in "moc" C++, which adds one of the best features in Objective-C to C++, while still managing to make it ugly and difficult to use.
With GNUStep, you'll be writing Objective-C, which is actually very pleseant to use. There's a reason you never hear about C++ users that love C++: They talk about how "it's good for some tasks", or "they use python when not using C++" but there are tonnes of people who write the code you write in python in Objective-C, and do it faster and cleaner than you ever could.
Yes, GNUStep runs on Windows, and with Yellow box (Dharma), you have yet another choice in what kind of cross-platform compatability you like.
What else do you want
How about a complete and coherant environment that works? That's why we want Objective-C. I highly recommend everyone try it. You'll find that there's a good reason people get more done faster with it, and there's an even better reason why people actually love it.
So how about you STFU before you start telling everyone about all the other things they could use as long as they don't use Objective-C, and just realize that they use Objective-C because it is the best.
Steve Jobs doesn't know a single thing about programming.
Yes he does, he just hasn't done it for quite a while.
Oh please. Steve Jobs couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.
Havoc Video
OK Geezer, time for the Alzheimer test. You've responded to two of my posts now, and both times you've exhibited severe mental frailness. Either that or your college curriculum has deprived you from basic reading comprehension.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I did. I dumped Mac support.
Gotta love you apologists showing us all that these are not flaws, they're features.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Ah, yes. The old "but that wasn't REAL communism" red herring.
But there has never been a pure laissez faire capitalist state, so your point is stupid.
Why does it devolve into slavery, starvation, and mass-murder EVERY SINGLE TIME?
Oh? And how many communist countries have done this recently? And if you're willing to bring up stuff that happened decades ago, it is perfectly fair to do the same for capitalist democracies - colonialism, slavery, Japanese internment, slaughter of native americans, and so on and so on.
Ya think?
Maybe you should take a history course and try it sometime.