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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?"
Personally, I prefer Obj-C to .NET, mostly due to the (IMO) superior organization and layout of the object model. It's simpler than .NET's API, which tends toward "everything and the kitchen sink." Not that Cocoa doesn't have it's problems. It's probably more difficult to write big projects using it, but for quick development, I find it faster to just throw something together in Xcode. Besides, it doesn't hurt that Xcode and it's related dev tools are free on OSX, whereas it's a $600 investement on Windows for the equivalent software.
.NET has something like three different objects to deal with different types of file access. Cocoa implements these in a single object with multiple methods for the data access style (streaming, read the whole thing once, etc.) Now, it's probably just personal preference on my part, but why invent multiple objects when you could just roll them up as separate methods for what is essentially the same data structure? There's probably a reason, and I'd be interested in learning why this is so, but it just seems to me that Cocoa did it right in the first place.
A good example of the complexity is the file access models for both APIs.
As an old-school programmer (20+ years of Fortran, C, various assembly languages, C++ many many years ago), who's spent the last dozen years or so focused almost exclusively on server-side high-performance networking systems (in other words, heavy-duty C/Unix/threading), I've taken my 'spare time' in the last few months to teach myself ObjC/Cocoa, Java, and some of the .NET technologies. I found it unfortunate that Apple deprecated Java + Cocoa in the last XCode release -- not because I particularly enjoyed Java but because it was easier to learn both Java and ObjC at the same time when I could be doing the same things with it.
... and I'm guessing the set of people who have is extremely small nowadays.
Comparing ObjC to what MSFT offers nowadays seems to be apples and oranges (no pun intended) and the learning curve is much different -- coming from straight C, ObjC is much cleaner, and I can slide more extensive Cocoaization in as I go. On the other hand, the ObjC syntax is a mess and weird for people who've never done Smalltalk
As for development environments, so far I've _hated_ everything to do with visual * -- it seems to be a monster to use, to customize, and to work with efficiently, at least for this old Unix hack. XCode is far far far from perfect -- I wish the SCM integration were better, that the whole thing were a _lot_ faster, and that they'd release incremental documentation updates rather than 250M batches every couple weeks -- but since it's all wrapped on gcc/g++/gdb/make at the back end, you can entirely do your stuff with vi/emacs/whatever at the command line and never use the GUI much at all, if that's your preference...
As a .NET developer, I haven't looked too hard at Mac dev tools, but I will say I could see an argument that Microsoft's rich development environment has some unexcpected consequences. Microsoft has made it easy for just about anybody to pick up software development, and as a result, just about anybody has picked up software development. =)
This can be good, but a downside is that some of the emphasis on design, best practices, etc. is lost. An office nerd who happens to get into VB is not traditionally pushed to think about things like standard UI guidelines. So in a sense the rich toolset can detract from good software. MS seems to be aware of this, and you can see a definite push for more guidance from them. Still, they have a ways to go IMO, and finding the balance between making development easy and making it "good" is difficult.
On the other hand, after several years of writing code in mostly python and other similar languages, the thought of going back to something like C (pointers!) doesn't really motivate me to write code for my mac. It's a good thing there are bridges like py-objc and such.
(Disclaimer: I first became aware of Objective-C about a decade ago, and have used IB/etc on Openstep -- on a NeXT slab, even).
C++ started out as C with a special preprocessor. So what?
I'd be interested to see some up-to-date figures to back up your assertion. GCC 3.1 gave a 2x speed increase in method dispatch, and GCC 4.0 has -fobjc-direct-dispatch.
msgc_ObjSend without the GCC 4.0 optimization is 22 cycles. Somehow I doubt that's really your big performance issue.
This is the usual Java/C++ argument of 'There is no value in dynamic typing, because I can write a program that does the same thing using static typing'. Well, yes, and I can write a program that does the same thing in machine code, but that doesn't mean high level languages have no value.
Some of us like having introspection, metaclasses, true parametric polymorphism and so on, without having to implement ugly workarounds. Personally, I think that ubiquitous (implicit) dynamic typing is a major aid to code reuse and software development agility.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Many of your complaints with the language seem to be much more a "it's different from other things, therefore wrong."
Namespaces is the one I see foisted around the most. I can see some value to adding namespace, but not enough to muck up the language. Objective-C was designed to be the simplest wrapper around C as possible while enabling an OO approach. With the much flatter hierarchies Objective-C's weak-binding and dynamicism encourage, the lack of namespaces is a relatively minor thing. Some people want them, but there's really no compelling need for them. I, for one, am glad that Objective-C has avoided the "throw in everything but the kitch sink" approach that has caused C++ to bloat in recent years.
Abstract class support? Again, why? The language doesn't need this. Objective-C's approach is to trust that the developer knows that he or she is doing. It doesn't take the paranoid approach that C++ and Java and the other Modula-3 inspired languages do, but that's not a flaw, it's a design choice. Objective-C is bad for stupid programmers, that I'll readily admit.
All methods are public, but they don't have to be advertised in your header file. Again, it's the nature of the language, and the result of a conscious design choice, not a flaw. You don't need this, even though many programmers have been indoctrinated into thinking they do.
I give you some points on the constructor issue. A language-level support for the DI or an official "constructor" method would be a good addition and add relatively little to the language and runtime. Garbage Collection is not something I personally want, but I know many people do; it's in the works. GCC 4.0 has support for it, it just hasn't been fully integrated into Cococa yet. Probably with the next release (is it Puma? I can't even remember all the cat names any more).
If this is what is keeping you from developing with Objective-C, then you've picked a poor reason to avoid learning it.
Pointers are as easy to avoid in Objective-C as they are in Java. In Java, all reference types are in fact a pointer, but simply a pointer which you don't need to think about. There is no pass-by-value for reference types, and no pointer arithmetic is allowed.
In Objective-C, everything is again passed by reference (as opposed to by value). Pointer arithmetic is generally completely unnecessary (although it is technically permitted).
I recently finished v1.0 of a decent sized Objective-C application, and the "&" operator isn't used once. The '*' operator is only used when defining a variable, return type, or parameter.
I don't even think of pointers when coding in Objective-C. I tend to think of it as no different than Java. Extra capabilities to do pointer arithmetic are there, but I simply don't typically feel the need to use any of them.
Yaz.
I'm sorry, but I have to agree with Steve and completely disagree with Mr. Dhanjani. I think that the language "choice" on .NET is silly - you can use whatever language you want so long as the language has exactly the same features as C#. For example, look at the feature set of "managed C++". No multiple inheritance and other non-C# features have been removed. Same for other languages.
I program with Objective-C and Cocoa all the time. I am mostly happy with it and in fact I will not be using the Garbage Collection feature for my apps.
I have complaints about Cocoa, but not being able to program in Ruby or Python is NOT one of them.
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