Sony Adopts Objective-C and GNUstep Frameworks

EMB Numbers writes "Sony has revealed that the new SNAP development environment for 'consumer electronics' is based on Objective-C and the open source GNUstep implementation of Apple's Openstep spec. While Apple has continued to update their specification in the form of Cocoa and Mac OS X, GNUstep has preserved the original standard. Anyone familiar with Cocoa Touch and iOS will feel right at home developing for Sony. There may even be some source code compatibility between the platforms. The world continues to chase apple — probably for the better."

Comments

Re:Bizarre choice

[beelsebob]

Actually, Objective-C's performance is very very good, and verbosity is absolutely a good thing. The problems I might raise with objective-c would involve it's highly dynamic nature, and lack of a decent type system, not it's implementation's speed or it's code clarity, which are both positive advantages for it!

Cocoa is also one of the absolute cleanest application development frameworks out there by far (CocoaTouch improves on it a chunk though purely by binning a lot of old cruft), so I'd say sony made a bloody good choice.

Re:For the better?

[onefriedrice]

Yes , I agree about the syntax. Instead of creating a nice consistent extension to the C language as Bjarn did with C++ (albeit with some kludges) , Obj-C really looks like someone tossed a completely different language into C because it was easier than making an effort to actually extend C nicely, and then didn't even bother to stir the resulting dogs dinner.

I laughed at this post, but then I realized you might not be trying to be funny. As a C++ programmer myself, I've never heard anyone referring to C++ in a serious way as a "nice consistent extension to the C language." C++ is an absolute monster. It's completely inconsistent in many ways and is riddled with so many "gotchas" that it takes years until you should be able to call yourself an expert. That's a long time in the context of learning a new way to describe what a computer should do.

I haven't programmed in Objective-C in years, but I do remember that it is far simpler to learn than C++. It adds comparatively little to the C language, as far as syntax goes; basically just the [] message-passing construct and the @ keywords. I think Objective-C "2.0" may have distinguished itself a little more, but I haven't looked into it.

Anyway, hopefully you're being funny. Otherwise, we have completely different opinions. Objective-C seems to have extended C in a way that is much nicer and cleaner than C++ IMO.