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Best Developer Tools for OS X
NoviceW writes to share that there are plenty of interesting articles written about Mac OS X applications for switchers, but not many guides focused on programmers switching from other operating systems. This guide lists a few of the more prominent tools for Mac developers, what other tools can't you do without?
One can run Linux alongside Windows on the same hardware. Why, then, has Linux application development not shrivelled up? Why are there native Linux applications? Perhaps it's because if a user has chosen an 'alternate platform' such as OS X or Linux, they're not going to be very happy about having to run Windows too; dual-booting is never as pleasant as running a native app, and perhaps - just perhaps - there are things OS X, Linux, et al can do that Windows can't.
And besides, with more Macs being sold, perhaps marketshare isn't everything. An audience of several million is still an audience of several million...
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
More like, the compatibility of C, and the messaging power of Smalltalk.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What is the point of doing native OS X development?
I do it to make money. So do rather a lot of other developers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Look for instance at .NET/C#. People are writing about this cool feature it has - delegates. But in Objective-C such behaviour is natural, and besides, requires no use of additional language features. Objective-C can be explained on few pieces of paper, you just have to remember some particular rules, whereas in C# or Java (or other object oriented staticly typed language) you have for each such thing a special case, which burdens your memory.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
I'm really tired of people equating PHP with bad programming and amateurish developers. PHP is a language as is Ruby, Python and Visual Basic for that matter. They're tools, nothing more.
Whether or not YOU choose to employ good coding practises or not when you code in PHP that's up to you. I'm sure there's bad Ruby and Python coders out there too. Granted, PHP may encourage inexperienced developers to take the easier, less maintainable way. But it doesn't mean that that's what happens every time.
Don't bash the developer for the language they're using. Just because you seem to become a worse developer because of it doesn't have to mean that it happens to the rest of us.
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
It's funny though.
One thing I've learned over the years is you can't ever fully divorce a language from the paradigms burned into its users' heads; they are continually reproduced as if you'd wired in an unconscious brain to fingers macro. Once an idiom is common in a community of programmers, it stays there until it is forcibly ejected by deleting the language and API features it depends on.
What was best feature of C? That the Kernighan and Ritchie were master programmers, and everybody learned from their book. Many also used Kernighan's Software Tools books, and since books on this topic were far fewer in those days, many also had Kernighan and Plaugher's Elements of Programming Style.
The biggest problem with Java is the nearly reflexive bloat of Java Programmers who were weaned on enterprise APIs. The problem with PHP is the opposite: the very first steps a PHP programmer tends to take instruct him on how convenient mixing business logic and HTML is.
There is nothing that prevents you from writing great enterprise PHP software, other than your own habits. But don't underestimate the force of habit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The thing that I like about Obj-C is the way that it's a strict superset of C, unlike C++.There are only something like 12 extra bits of syntax, largely derived from Smalltalk.
Reading your post what's interesting is that the languages you found easy to move around in were all procedural, so I wonder if the problem is actually to do with making the procedural / OO transition? I'll confess that having been programming since the early 80s, I still don't 'think OO' in the way I see younger developers do (sometimes to their detriment), but I did have a nice bridge to it from Pascal through Modula-n and ADA.
C++ 'won' pretty much for the reason that it was an easier transition for C-developers - even if it wasn't wholly C-compatible, and had some compromises in it's OO implementation, I think there was less of a mental leap to make for the procedural developer.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh