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:For the better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - it allows inconsistent dynamic runtime crashes thanks to the lack of compile time binding. Great, thanks Obj-C.

Re:How compatitble

[HeronBlademaster]

What I find unintuitive and difficult to read is the whole paradigm of "let's combine the method name with the name of the first parameter!" idea that Objective-C is so fond of, plus the "let's surround everything with square brackets!" idea that they layered on top of it.

Foo* foo = [[Foo alloc] initWithBar:bar];

Really? initWithBar? Is that really better than this:

Foo* foo = new Foo(bar);

The whole paradigm is designed for IDEs that can't show you the names and types of function parameters as you're typing. Granted, that sort of feature wasn't around when C and C++ were put together, but to claim it as a "benefit" of Objective-C now just means you aren't using a modern IDE. (Which I suppose isn't surprising, since Xcode is a horribly, horribly sucky IDE, most especially that particular feature.)

Re:How compatitble

[jeremyp]

Citation needed