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

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: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

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.