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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."
For all the things Apple has done right and does well, clinging on to Objective-C is not one of them.
It'd be nice if you pointed out, you know, actual reasons rather than just make snide comments. I'm sure some knee-jerk Apple haters will vote you up though.
My issues with iOS development lie not with Objective-C, but with Apple's frameworks and libraries. It's frustrating to only have header files and not be able to check out what a method actually does when debugging. Fortunately, the documentation for their classes is top-notch. The objc runtime is also a pretty wild ride, but once you know your way around you can poke at it and find out where your messages are going at least. Can check out the source for the runtime here http://opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/
Another issue of course, is XCode. I've switched to writing most of my iOS code in vim, building my code with the xcodebuild command. I still rely on XCode to do things like add files to the xcodeproj and manage the build configurations. XCode has a mind of its own, wacky completions, a completely fucked up undo buffer, strange locations for settings, and more frustrating joys. Would love to do away with that.
Check out the cocoa.vim plugin, and also, while I'm at it, you can get your vim for your local environment pimped out in minutes with Vimlander 2: The quickening. Test driving my apps with Pivotal's Cedar framework.
Long live the BSD license
I think you have that backwards. Objective-C doesn't change any of the rules of C. On the other hand there's a lot of C syntax that is not valid C++.
Both C++ and Objective-C started off as object oriented extensions to C, and IMO Objective-C does a much better job. C++ tried to add everything and the kitchen sink, and ended up with horrible, bastardized syntax because it's still trying to achieve C compatibility, even though it hasn't been strictly compatible with C in over a decade.
It's even more noticeable if you look at what's considered "good" code in each language. The following is valid C, Obj-C and C++, but a C++ weenie will whine that it's not using std::cout.
#include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello world!\n"); return 0; }