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?"

Comments

well...

[soapdog]

not being a troll but remember "if it's not broken, don't fix it"? Objective-C and the Cocoa Frameworks are an amazing combo, very productive to code using it. I don't think there's much to add. It's not bloated like VisualStudio.NET, it's easy to grasp and understand, code is small... well, I just like the way it is, and XCode is a lot better than Project Builder so I think we're on a nice path, I don't want to see Apple reinventing its development environment every couple years...

the Wow factor.

[revery]

What has Apple done recently to wow the developers, and make it fun to code Cocoa components?

When you pull in developers by "wowing" them, you get a certain type of developer. I certainly don't want my buildings and bridges built by engineers who were attracted to pastel concrete and click-and-deploy girders. Having said that, I realize that sometimes, small quirky apps written by "poet coders" can make a platform a lot more interesting, I just doubt that that's what causes innovation or platform acceptance.

Objective C is hard to beat

[brindle]

Objective C is a very good language. I has a lot of the atractive OO features and still it lets you get as close to the machine as you'd like. For example you can drop into C and do your own memory management for parts of the code where you are allocating and deallocating lots memory. You can also code in assembly if you feel the performance gain is necessary.

Objective C appears to be a good development environment. Apple for example, has developed a lot of software in a short amount of time that is of very good quality: Safari, ITunes, Page, Keynote, mail...

The ability of .Net to use any language is kind of sexy, but I'm not sure you are going to gann anything in the long run.

-b

Re:I dunno

[Tim C]

I've always felt Visual Studio (at least with all the .Net stuff) was turning more into a Visual Basic type of dev platform.

I'm not entirely sure what that comment means - haven't you *always* been able to use VS as "a Visual Basic type of dev platform", with Visual C++ even ignoring Visual Basic itself? VS.NET does support Visual Basic .NET after all - is it really surprising that the drag and drop method of RAD is being further extended?

It's more for application development than actual (think CS rather than IT) programming.

Application development isn't actual programming? Theory is extremely important, and I'm the first to defend seeking knowledge for knowledge's sake, but to say that application development isn't real programming is to deny the entire point of programming - to automate processes and create applications in order to make tasks easier (or quicker) to perform, and to enable people to do things that previously they could not (eg edit video or audio).

Every time the ObjC/C++ discussion comes up...

[squarooticus]

...I fire back with the almost-certainly-true statement that "You don't know C++ well enough to judge its value as a language."

I have been coding in C++ for about 15 years; I have seen the language evolve over that time; and while there are aspects that I don't like, for the most part I think C++ is wonderful and natural to program in, as long as one takes the time to design API's in an extensible way. This is no different from any other language, though C++ certainly gives you more rope if you are already inclined to hang yourself; but, OTOH, the extra slack makes it possible to type-safely do things that cannot be done in languages without multiple inheritance or parametric polymorphism.

FWIW, the same is true of me for Objective C: I can make only the most shallow, uninformed observations about it, so I generally avoid doing so. Perhaps one day I'll learn it so I can make an informed judgment about it, but until then, I'll keep my mouth shut.

Re:Every time the ObjC/C++ discussion comes up...

[penguin-collective]

"You don't know C++ well enough to judge its value as a language."

Ease of learning is an important part of language design.

I think C++ is wonderful and natural to program in, as long as one takes the time to design API's in an extensible way

The amount of effort a language forces you to invest up-front in design decisions is also an important factor to consider.

Personally, I think C++ is a great language--but only for specialty applications and very skilled programmers.

For most mainstream desktop applications, people are better served with Python, Visual Basic, or Smalltalk, precisely because those languages are easier to learn and require less experience to use well.

Re:Objective C was a neat idea in the 80's BUT...

[joto]

This looks all good in theory. Fortunately, the objective C developers have thought about the problem, and they have come up with a solution that is quite fast. So in the real world, and objective C message send is about 2x-3x as slow as a C function call. Which is not too bad. The obvious implementation you hint at, would probably be more like 50x-100x slower. Fortunately, it's not the one that's used in practice, and I doubt you will ever find it in an objective C compiler (unless you were to write one yourself, just to prove your point).

Can't go home again

[TapestryDude]

Objective-C was my first object-oriented language (this was back in 93 - 95). I loved the syntax and the integrated vision of the tools and frameworks ... but I hated memory management. The whole retain/release/autorelease thing was always a bug waiting to happen, and I spent many wasted hours tracking those down (basically, retain/release works great for trees but flops around like a dying fish for graphs).

Anyway, I simply can't go back to a non-memory managed environment again.

I have seen that, as I've matured as an OO developer, and as I've distanced myself from Objective-C, my style has changed. The Objective-C libraries are heavily based on inheritance, but I've learned that "composition trumps inheritance" ... meaning that its better to combine many small focused objects. In Objective-C, you have a layer-cake approach, where each layer of inheritance mixes in a particular concern. This makes sense when you want to minimize the number of objects allocated, but in a GC language (Java, Ruby, etc.) you end up with better, more testable code when you let the GC do its thing.

You can see this in Tapestry, where currently (through the 4.0 release) you extend base classes. I'm starting to gear up to break this limitation for 4.1 (where you will use simple objects and have framework dependencies injected into your classes).

ProjectBuilder was great in its time, but compared to Eclipse, it's hopeless. IB still rocks, and I wish Sun had demostrated some intelligence when first designing Swing by investigating IB. That is, Swing treats UIs as a coding problem, IB treats it as a configuration problem.

But, as I said, you can't go home again.

Re:Objective C was a neat idea in the 80's BUT...

[fpillet]

Overall, objective c message call performance is comparable to Javascript.

You haven't written any real code with Objective-C, have you ? I have a couple commercial apps written in full Obj-C and I can tell you that what you're saying is plain wrong. The message dispatcher is fast, uses caching techniques, and in case you have a really tight algorithm that neeeds to send millions of messages to perform some computation, you can always get the IMP pointer to the final address instead of going through the dispatcher. But I certainly never felt the need for that.

A dumb developer will write bad code in ANY language. And of course, he'll blame the language ;-)

Now, of course you can just call C functions, but then what is the point of objective C?

... or what's the point in any OO language, when you can code in straight C? Exactly the same: designing and structuring your code. The single selling point with Objective-C / Cocoa is the NSAutoreleasePool mechanism. This mechanism is like a garbage collector finally done right.

Modern languages like Java, C# provide all the dynamsism of objective C, but do it effciently thougth vtables and reflection.

Reflection is insanely costly to use. Actually MS recommends to avoid it if you can, especially on mobile platforms. Besides, are you saying that Java or C#, both JITted languages, are faster than Objective-C ? Think twice. Microsoft itself says that C# is slower than the less optimized C compiled code you can find. And I have yet to see a Java app doing anything significant that is not slow as molasses.

Re:Jef Raskin on Steve Jobs

[jcr]

he gives the inside story on Steve Jobs:

No, Raskin gives his opinion of Steve Jobs. Read Andy Hertzfeld's book for some perspective on Raskin.

-jcr

Re:Wowing developers...

[Durandal64]

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. Objective-C has the most intelligent syntax of any language I've ever worked with. Just because none of the latest "miracle" languages, like C# and Java, have adopted a new function calling syntax doesn't mean there aren't problems with it. Frankly, the constructor naming for C++, Java and C# is brain-dead. What makes more sense?

color = NSColor(128, 128, 64, 0);

or

color = [NSColor colorWithRed:128 Green:128 Blue:64 Alpha:0];

I would much rather have an idea of what parameters are without having to refer to a header file. And being able to have initializers that are of different names is a HUGE plus. In C++ et al, all your constructors are forced to have the same name, varying only among their parameters. I could do a

color = [NSColor redColor];

call and still get a new color object. In C++, you'd have to pass in some sort of enumerated constant or something.

And this says nothing about the ridiculous naming conventions of C++ and Java. Translate the following statements into English.

value = object.getValue();

and

value = [object value];

The first is C++ and translates to "Assign value to get the value of object". The second is Objective-C and translates to "Assign value to value of object". This is why Objective-C is called a self-documenting language.

As for memory management, yes, it can be a pain. Any Cocoa developer could tell you tales of how he accidentally released an autoreleased object and spent a half-hour trying to figure it out. But Objective-C is a strict superset of C. Being able to work with pointers is absolutely necessary. That's one of the biggest strong-points of Objective-C. Virtually any C library will work with absolutely no modification at all.

I'd love to see garbage collection added, but not as the primary method of managing memory. It should be there to catch what the developer misses, not to be the sole method of memory management. We'll never get rid of pointers. They will always be there.

Don't ruin Steve, please

[hkb]

The one thing I really like about Steve Jobs... well there are lots of things. The thing I like most about Steve Jobs is that he's unusually candid in email. I have written him a few times in the past from everything about OS X to vegan recipes and he's replied, often with expressed interest and candidness. This is something not to be abused. When this kind of stuff is publicized, I worry about two things:

1. Steve gets inundated with tons of dumb emails just to get a "response from steve" to hang on the wall. End effect is that Steve stops reading his email.

2. Steve stops being so personable because he figures anything he says will end up splattered all over the web. Within a few days, this simple "Dear Steve, I don't like Objective-C" thing will be blown out of proportion by cnet, dvorak, and other journalists who are entirely too clueless, et al. Remember, what Steve says could affect stock prices, etc. And Steve will just sigh and stop responding.

It's really, really nice having a CEO that doesn't just communicate through press releases, folks. Don't ruin it. It was my hope that those few who knew Steve responded to his email would keep it on the down low.

Re:namespaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody gets to be as successful as Jobs without a lot of talent.

Re:The emails are already gone.

[Yaztromo]

And this, kids, is why you should never ever top-post.

Yaz.