Slashdot Mirror
Objective-C Comes of Age
New submitter IdleThoughts writes "Sometimes it takes a long time to spark a revolution. Long the ugly duckling of programming languages, iOS' Objective-C passed C# in the 'TIOBE Programming Community Index this month and seems on a trajectory to overtake C++ in the next few. It was invented in the early 1980s by Brad Cox and Tom Love, with the idea of creating 'Software Integrated Circuits' and heavily influenced by Smalltalk — yet another legacy from Xerox PARC, along with desktop GUIs, ethernet and laser printers. It was adopted early on by Steve Jobs' NeXTStep, the grand-daddy of all that is now OS X. It had to wait, however, for the mobile device revolution to have its day, being ideally suited to the limited resources on portable devices. It's still being actively developed by Apple and others, sporting the new automatic reference counting and static analysis in the Clang compiler. It turns out it has supported dynamic patching of code in applications all along. What more surprises does this venerable language have up its sleeve?"
Clang recently added literal syntax for collections and boxed numbers:
NSArray *array = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"one", @"two", @"three", nil];
NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
@"bar", @"foo",
@"post", @"first",
nil];
NSNumber *num = [NSNumber numberWithInteger:42];
NSArray *array = @[ @"one", @"two", @"three" ];
NSDictionary *dict = @{
@"foo" : @"bar",
@"first": @"post"
};
NSNumber *num = @42;
Properties will also be synthesized by default, so you won't have to write @synthesize statements anymore, and corresponding ivars will be synthesized with an underscore prefixed name.
Objective-C is interesting to follow because it's a language that was once considered totally niche and almost completely irrelevant, but the frameworks were beloved by developers, and the language's keepers kept at it long enough for the world to see how useful the language is. It also has historical significance as the tools used for creation of the original WorldWideWeb program as well as the development of Doom and Quake. John Romero wrote about he and Carmack simultaneously editing the same map in DoomEd thanks to distributed objects.
It's still verbose and Smalltalk-ish, but the language as a whole has improved drastically since the transition to Clang. According to the mailing list, Apple has more engineers allocated to the language than ever before, and a lot of it has to do with the move away from GCC.
I hear that GCC is working toward being easier to modify, so the competition from Clang has been good for everybody, and it's all open source.
Its recent success has obviously been tied to one gigantic hit platform, for which it is the only natively supported PL.
Fine language in many ways but I call 'Boo' on the method syntax.
Look, I understand that people who use their tools daily want to advertise them and it's a goosd thing if you like what you're using, but let's face it: Objective-C is just another unsafe, hopelessly outdated extension of C as C++. It's great to get things done and sucks less than C++, but it's not in any way a modern language nor is it based on a great language design.
Before people start flaming me, please consider that programming languages are tools and you choose the right tool for the right purpose and platform, and the availability of libraries is often more important than the language itself. There is no doubt that Objective-C has its place and is useful, just don't try to sell it as the latest great new thingy. Even Apple's own old Dylan was a more interesting and innovative as a language than Objective-C.
My 2 cents. Now let the language flamewars commence.
Seems like every few weeks someone writes another story about the amazing "trends" in the TIOBE Index. As far as I can see, the real trend is: Languages go up in popularity, they go down, they move around, one month it's the First! Time! Ever! that a language has made the list, the next month it's gone again, and C, C++, and Java are always at the top (in varying order). Such variable results suggest that TIOBE's sampling method isn't all that reliable or accurate to begin with, but I think we all have a pretty good idea what languages people are really using and for what.
Breakfast served all day!
Look, I understand that people who use their tools daily want to advertise them and it's a good thing if you like what you're using, but let's face it: C is just another unsafe, hopelessly outdated extension of assembly. It's great to get things done and sucks less than fortran, but it's not in any way a modern language nor is it based on a great language design.
This seems more likely to be due to the easy money currently seeming to be in iOS apps. It's a big installed base, there's a delivery system, and the consumers have been trained to expect to pay some money for just about everything on it (whereas the usefulness of free 'droid apps generally seems to be way higher - in my, admittedly limited, experience).
I mean, if you have an idea, then the thing you want to do is try and get a few hundred thousand people to buy it for a $1, so that's what everyone is currently doing. I don't think it really says anything beyond that.
In software years, one does not come of age until his 30s, and only then because he finally accepts prostitution.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Objective-C is just another unsafe, hopelessly outdated extension of C as C++.
Why do you claim it is "unsafe"? Almost all work done in Objective-C is very "safe", by any measure - mostly you are never using C arrays or the like. Just because they are there does not make the language inherently "unsafe" if that's not how real people use the language.
consider that programming languages are tools and you choose the right tool for the right purpose and platform, and the availability of libraries is often more important than the language itself.
Objective-C currently has some of the most advanced libraries for any platform. It already had great string support and other strong frameworks even before iOS, but with iOS and the Mac taking off the framework support for really advanced animations, database work, networking, etc. as good as or better than any other platform. I came from a Java world and am missing nothing for libraries... not to mention a really good set of open source libraries that offer other abilities in addition to the core frameworks.
In fact, I would go so far as to say the range and quality of design of the frameworks are THE reason to use Objective-C.
People like you just look at when Objective-C was developed and think because of its age it cannot be "modern". What you don't realize is that Objective-C was developing over all that time, just in a fairly parallel path to other languages - I like to refer to it as a "Steampunk" language. It is modern but just not quite the same as other things you are used to, coming from an alternate reality.
You're going to have to come up with real reasons for Objective-C not being "modern", most of which are probably quite out of date by now. Before we can flame you, there need to be specifics which we can skewer...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I dev in ObjC on iOS almost every day, and the language sucks. I think it sucks less than C++, but I'm not sure that says much. The Xcode IDE (which also sucks) and the bolted-on features help, but overall the language hasn't aged as well as plain old C - i.e. while coding in it, you are constantly reminded that it is not a modern programming language. Anytime a language gets in your way, it's a bad thing, and that happens an awful lot with ObjC.
(And before the flames start: yes, I fully recognize that nobody is forcing me to dev for the iOS platform, it's a choice I've made because I make gobs of money off of it. But that doesn't make ObjC suck any less, it just makes me willing to tolerate the suck and grumble about it on /.)
What more surprises does this venerable language have up its sleeve?
Theres only one way to find out, and it involves wading through extraordinarily long, unintuitive, and overly verbose object, property, and method names until, Surprise!, you find yet another feature of limited utility.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
OSX is NOT the NeXT OS with the Mac GUI. That would be much better.
In fact it can be claimed to be a lineal descendent of NeXT, but it's been greatly modified, and the new UI is a regression from either the Mac or NeXT GUIs.
Also iOS - Obj C is obviously referring to the proprietary dialect of ObjC used in Apple mobie devices. (Nothing to do with Cisco iOS either, why cant they think of their own names for this stuff?) There are other dialects, notably the GCC version, which is much more widely applicable.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
When I evaluate a language the first thing I do is look at a random block of code and say to myself is this what I really want to be writing?
When I look at lisp all I see is endless streams of ()()())))) and my brain instantly reboots in a violent seizure.
jquery would be a decent system if only I could get over the rediculous hackish syntax needed to workaround underlying JS environment.
ASP and close neighbors were always a turnoff due to the weird escape sequences you needed to plaster absoultely everywhere more recently razor cleaned that up somewhat.
Objective c has too many perlish @ symbols and a rediculous number of [] [][][ ][][][] [] contraptions all over the place. I know this sounds and is shallow but when I look at code I really need to see the code not have to look under layers of syntatic nonsense existing only for convenience or compatibility/interop purposes.
Give me a capable clean language not hacks upon hacks.
Given enough time any language can be made useful... this does not mean I would ever willingly choose to use it. I'm instantly wary of languages with only one killer app (iphone) unless it is heavily domain specific.
Not entirely limited to Apple:
http://www.gnustep.org/
The asterisk next to his name means he's a subscriber, dumbass. Subscribers see articles before non-subscribers. You can write a reply in the box and submit it when the story goes live.
Objective-C is not exclusive to Apple platforms, they just happen to be one of it's most prominent supporters. As a matter of fact the GNU project has actually for long time been a supporter of the language due to its use in GCC and through the Gnustep project.
Its recent success has obviously been tied to one gigantic hit platform, for which it is the only natively supported PL.
To be clear, objective-c is only required for iOS user interface code. An iOS developer is free to use c/c++ elsewhere, free to use posix rather than iOS for many operating system services, etc.
I mean, that's the simple explanation. If Apple wasn't having a resurgence, would anyone be paying attention to Ojective-C?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Why do you claim it is "unsafe"? Almost all work done in Objective-C is very "safe", by any measure - mostly you are never using C arrays or the like. Just because they are there does not make the language inherently "unsafe" if that's not how real people use the language.
There is a common consensus in the CS community that pointers as opposed to references, pointer arithmetics, direct type conversion ("memory overlays") etc. are unsafe, and a language that makes it easy to use them is "inherently unsafe". (That doesn't have anything to do with actual programming practise. Obviously, you can write "safe" programs in any language, even in machine code, as long as you're very careful.) As a comparison, take Ada, Eifel, Java, Haskell -- these are all much safer.
As for "modern": Perhaps you haven't seen any modern programming languages yet? Because otherwise you should know what I mean. Relatively modern features are e.g. automatic type inference, automatic parallelism, contracts, a concurrent garbage collector -- things like that.
You know, or get the Express version that does everything a hobbyist needs for free.
Emphasize hobbyist, actually only some hobbyists. No 64-bit code for Express. No Microsoft Foundation Classes, MFC really simplifies Windows use interface coding and it is very commonly used in Windows apps. No profile guided optimization. No remote debugging. No resource editors.
I find Android apps are not nearly as useful as similar iOS apps. They are usually slower, uglier, and buggier - free or not.
Given the choice between a free Android app that is a turd, and a great iOS app that costs $1, I'll gladly pay the $1.
Also, for developers, I think there is more to it than just the money. With iOS you can test a reasonable amount of the devices on the market and the screen sizes they use. With Android? Not unless you happen to have a few hundred Android devices kicking around and a few months to test your app on all of them. Take into account the absolutely terrible hardware on the currently selling low end Androids that can barely keep up with the iPhone 3GS, the problems with having an app on the SD card instead of on the builtin memory, and then all screen sizes and aspect rations. Ugh.
Why do you claim it is "unsafe"?
He may be using unsafe in the same way as Microsoft. See this.
From that page:
... code that makes low-level API calls, uses pointer arithmetic, or carries out some other unsavory operation, has to be placed inside blocks marked with the unsafe keyword.
Heh, "unsavory". Personally, I think pointer arithmetic is delicious!
Tiobe's data is an indicator of how active internet based discussions on each programming language. Even Tiobe says it themselves:
"What programming languages are hot in the Internet discussions? "
and
" Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written." (http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)
All the graph on that link above shows is there's been an increase in the amount of discussion on Objective C. You can say it's due to an increase in adoption, or you could say it's due to people being absolutely fitful with learning it. There's no way to tell what the data means. You may as well google " sucks" and count the results.
I think the author/submitter is being very hopeful in the way they have construed the data.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
There is a common consensus in the CS community that pointers as opposed to references, pointer arithmetics, direct type conversion ("memory overlays") etc. are unsafe
In ObjectiveC we are really using objects more as references than as pointers.
Basically you come off here as just being afraid of something because you've been told it's scary, not because you've seen real issues.
As a comparison, take Ada, Eifel, Java, Haskell -- these are all much safer.
Exactly my point, As I said, I was a Java programmer (for almost a decade) - Objective-C is not really less safe at this point in practice. I say that in terms of stability and in terms of memory use (since you still do not say what you mean by "safe" and the world offers many perils).
As for "modern": Perhaps you haven't seen any modern programming languages yet?
Snark alert. As I said, I used Java for a LONG time. Before that I knew better languages still, Scheme and other things... Perhaps you have not worked with enough different languages to know what is really "safe" and what is not.
Because otherwise you should know what I mean.
I don't automatically agree with snobs.
Relatively modern features are e.g. automatic type inference, automatic parallelism, contracts, a concurrent garbage collector -- things like that.
You're still using a garbage collector? Do you watch that operate while gnawing on woolly mammoth bones or what? ARC is a far superior approach as it involves no overhead.
As for contracts... you really don't know Objective-C at all, do you?
You just come off as some ancient CS grad-school twat totally removed from real world programming. I've worked on large systems for multi-national corporations, and now on mobile applications used by millions of people. I don't automatically assume anything anymore, as experience I have found teaches you a lot more than mere theory or some summary of a language you have read on a blog.
Don't judge any language until you've tried to solve real problems with it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you are not 100% correct there. 64-bit tools are not available on Visual C++ Express by default. To enable 64-bit tools on Visual C++ Express, install the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) in addition to Visual C++ Express.
Not only that, but if you want to develop on iOS, you have the choice of... Obj-C.
That is not at all true, you can use C#, Ruby, Javascript, and other languages also...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Objective C, at least as used on iOS, is not a safe language. I don't see how anyone with serious programming experience could believe that.
Here are some things about it that are unsafe. Firstly, it's not garbage collected (on the phone). Manual memory management has a long history of resulting in memory corruptions, leaks, and even security vulnerabilities. Yes, on MacOS X there is GC available, so Apple clearly recognize this. They appear to believe that it's not OK on a phone.
Secondly, and this is just crazy to my mind, dereferencing a null pointer (ok, rephrase it in terms of sending messages to nil if you like) ..... does not terminate the application. It's actually a "defined" operation in the sense that it's defined to return garbage or another nil. Sending a message to nil has no useful purpose so it is guaranteed to reflect a bug in your application, unless (worse) you have some "clever" programmer who decided to rely on this obscure behavior. The nonsense of accessing NULL is why it is defined to result in an application crash on any sane platform - you want to stop the app at that point to avoid possible data corruption. But Objective C apps will happily continue their merry way, overwriting internal state with garbage or more nils until it auto-saves your now hopelessly corrupted data to disk.
This is a specific instance of a more general problem with Objective-C, which is that despite being based on C it turns a lot of failures that would be compile failures in any modern language into runtime failures or heuristically driven compiler warnings. Most research into programming languages for the last 10-15 years has been about how to catch more errors earlier, mostly through better type systems (a lot of functional research is in this direction). Objective-C takes a massive step backwards in this regard, converting errors even C++ compilers can catch ahead of time into issues you may not even notice unless you have extremely thorough testing plans. Example: typos in method names.
Thirdly, Objective-C does not have any kind of real namespacing support. The Cocoa libraries use the convention of an API prefix, but there's no language support for it, meaning "namespaces" such as they are tend to be very short or non-existant. Combined with the way symbols can mishmash together in the same binary can lead to awkward to solve linking issues.
There are a lot of problems with Objective-C that make it difficult to consistently write correct code and flatly contradict how modern languages are designed (no surprise, as it's not modern).
Let me summarize. You chose to ignore almost everything of what I've said
That summarizes your position. I corrected almost all of your points. You responded to only one of mine, and there not even a point on the language but a meta issue of languages and platforms that any third rate philosophy student could offer up as a supposedly "informed" opinion on computing.
have personally insulted me (makes you wonder who's the real snob?) made all kinds of presumptions about my background...
I only responded in kind. You started out insulting me first (and assuming I knew nothing about higher level languages even when I first stated I knew Java in my original post), giving me free range to question anything and everything about you.
The responses I type are a mirror on those who I am responding to. You came off as an arrogant elitist ivory-tower prick with little in the way of practical experience (that last item mostly based on the few concrete items you offered).
Furthermore you never even said what you DO know anything about, a very curious omission indeed! You can claim I got "everything wrong" all day long, while never revealing even a portion of what you do know while at the same time complaining we are guessing at it.
Perhaps you should try a different writing style if you would like more pleasant responses. Perhaps if you don't want people to get your background wrong you should provide some instead of poorly thought out complaints that illuminate only your area of ignorance and not your field of understanding.
The main disadvantage of Objective-C in practice is, of course, that you have to write the whole fucking program again if you want to have it run on Android or any other non-Apple platform.
In the end to have the best application for any platform you have to tailor it specifically for that platform; in REAL LIFE very little code can be reused even if the platforms share a similar language. The code itself matters so little compared to the conceptual model of how the program fits together.... and the parts of the code that really matter, in specific UI interactions have to be totally customized to a different platform anyway.
But I guess if you are OK with simply dumping bad applications out that annoy users I suppose I could see where you would have the opposite feelings and write drek that will run "anywhere".
In the end, it sounds like you are a typical ivory tower prick as I had you pegged at the start. You have only reenforced that vision with your later writings, abrasive and rude and pretending you know everything while illustrating how little real world understanding you have.
I'll let you have the last response, since you have nothing real to write but simply further fling insults while claiming you are above me. The readers know the truth, know how much you really know and exactly the tone of responses you drew out. I have already unmasked you, so my work with you is done.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No Microsoft Foundation Classes, MFC really simplifies Windows use interface coding
As someone with past MFC experience (years ago, thankfully), there's precisely one thing that it really simplifies, and that's gouging one's eyes out - you'll be adept at it after a few months.
Anyway, the OP was talking about C#, not C++, so MFC is largely irrelevant.
Objective C, at least as used on iOS, is not a safe language. I don't see how anyone with serious programming experience could believe that.
Some people with experience know better.
Here are some things about it that are unsafe. Firstly, it's not garbage collected (on the phone).
No, it uses ARC, which is superior, since there is no run time overhead.
Manual memory management has a long history of resulting in memory corruptions, leaks, and even security vulnerabilities.
Even under the old regime memory management was mostly automatic. You simply signaled when you wanted an object, and then when you were no longer interested. That is a strike against Objective-C many raise but I just never found to be an issue in practice.
Yes, on MacOS X there is GC available, so Apple clearly recognize this. They appear to believe that it's not OK on a phone.
You clearly are not keeping up on year old iPhone development practices.
Secondly, and this is just crazy to my mind, dereferencing a null pointer (ok, rephrase it in terms of sending messages to nil if you like) ..... does not terminate the application
I thought you just said you disliked memory corruption.
Sending a message to nil has no useful purpose so it is guaranteed to reflect a bug in your application,
if ( myString > 0 )
Nope, not a bug, and very useful compared to:
if ( myString != nil && myString > 0)
That alone, if you have done any Java programming, would make it all worthwhile. Basically it safeguards against all kinds of horrible bugs if sending a message to nil means nothing. Would you prefer shouting into the void rip off your arms? Why would you prefer that an accidental sending to an obviously un-initialized space break the program? Madness!
despite being based on C it turns a lot of failures that would be compile failures in any modern language
Poor Objective-C, choosing a different path. DIFFERENT IS TEH EVILS!
They have made different choices but they are not bad ones. They are along the age old lines of deciding where they sat on the sliders of things like dynamic vs. static, and then making the best of where they landed.
Most research into programming languages for the last 10-15 years has been about how to catch more errors earlier,
Meet CLANG. Objective-C development is NOT hurting for early warnings you have problems, and in fact is probably ahead of just about any other language right now. "modern" or otherwise.
Example: typos in method names.
You have got to be kidding me, there were compiler warnings about that as far back as I remember. Just because you CAN send any message to an object does not render you doing so any less an error a compiler can easily flag, just as mis-typing a function name would raise an error.
Thirdly, Objective-C does not have any kind of real namespacing support.
That is very annoying at first coming from other languages. That is the one thing I would like them to resolve, as you say it can raise overlap issues. But in the end it's really a minor thing as the naming convention (mostly a class prefix), works OK. The main problem with it though is not the one you raise - overlap with other classes in fact raises a linker error, so it's not like that really happens for whole classes. No, the problem with lack of namespaces is the inability to easily include a large number of header files at once by simply declaring you want to use a namespace.
There are a lot of problems with Objective-C that make it difficult to consistently write correct code and flatly contradict how modern languages are designed (no surprise, as it's not modern).
Funny how Objective-C has now leapfrogged ahead of other "modern" languages in terms of library support and language features like ARC. I programmed Java for over a decade and would b
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you have got to be kidding.
right?