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Objective-C Overtakes C++, But C Is Number One
mikejuk writes "Although the TIOBE Index has its shortcomings, the finding that Objective-C has overtaken C++ is reiterated in the open source Transparent Language Popularity Index. The reason is, of course, that Objective-C is the language you have to use to create iOS applications — and as iPads and iPhones have risen in popularity, so has Objective-C. If you look at the raw charts then you can see that C++ has been in decline since about 2005 and Objective-C has shot up to overtake it with amazing growth. But the two charts are on different scales: if you plot both on the same chart, you can see that rather than rocketing up, Objective-C has just crawled its way past, and it is as much to do with the decline of C++. It simply hasn't reached the popularity of C++ in its heyday before 2005. However the real story is that C, a raw machine independent assembler-like language, with no pretense to be object oriented or sophisticated, has beaten all three of the object oriented heavy weights — Java, C++ and Objective C. Yes C is number one (and a close second in the transparent index)."
But that's just my opinion.
sorry but html and javascript is the future.. it must be true because all the kids just out of college say so.
However the real story is that C, a raw machine independent assembler-like language, with no pretense to be object oriented or sophisticated, has beaten all three of the object oriented heavy weights
This sounds like it was written by someone who doesn't understand C. You can write object orientated code in C. You don't always need the language to hold your hand. And C is NOT assembler-like language. Not even close.
And as far as sophisticated code, I guess the author doesn't consider operating systems or most system programming to be sophisticated.
C's philosophy doesn't integrate well with Ayn Rand's.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Java's apparent decline seems to be because of the financial slump. Where the number of new enterprise projects using Java has reduced. Most of this work was deferred and is starting to pick up again (at least as far as I can see). Some of the apparent 'decline' in languages is due to the introduction of new languages. The absolute number of projects using any language may be increasing but with new languages being introduced the proportion for any one language becomes diluted.
That said, C deserves to be right up there because it is still completely relevant as a 'lingua franca' (common language) for talking to hardware or operating systems. It also has the same benefits of Java in that the language is small and the convention is to place complexity in the libraries rather than as arbitrarily added keywords. This is not very exciting for many Slashdotters but for regular joes it allows them to get things done while working on huge, long-term projects (where the set of staff that start the project aren't necessarily those that finish it) where being able to follow other people's code is critical. This doesn't make for good press or excitement in the blogosphere or conference circuit but these two stalwarts pretty much let you solve any problem in any computing environment (portability matters!).
typedef struct { // And data goes here.
int (*open)(void *self, char *fspec);
int (*close)(void *self);
int (*read)(void *self, void *buff, size_t max_sz, size_t *p_act_sz);
int (*write)(void *self, void *buff, size_t max_sz, size_t *p_act_sz);
} tCommClass;
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/351733/can-you-write-object-oriented-code-in-c
"Objective-C is the language you have to use to create iOS applications"
There are plenty of games and other iOS applications that are written in C and C++.
Yes, there is a little bit of "glue" code required for interaction with Apple APIs, but the implication here is that you can't use another language write the majority of an iOS Application, which is wrong.
you are aware that the first C++ compilers simply generated C code from the C++ then compiled to that.
Oh, and I've seen several OO languages written in C as well, that some senior engineer who "didn't trust C++" came up with. The only thing you don't get with these is enforcement of visibility with private/public, which isn't strictly required for OO. But polymorphism and the lot, yup, all that was there.
As much as I like languages like Perl and Java, where memory is managed for you (kind of), there will always be a great need for languages that brings programmers as close as necessary to the workings of the machine itself.
Here's a crazy brief explanation:
The big draw to OO is that it (ostensibly) makes it easier and/or faster to write applications. This doesn't mean that you can make programs with an OO language that you couldn't with an imperative or structured language, only that certain tasks may be easier to implement.
That said, OO isn't always the best option. OO languages are typically a lot more complex and produce slower executables than plain C, so there is a trade-off that can be important in certain situations. As with anything, pick the best tool for the job.
For myself, when I first learned programming (via some books), I learned C before moving to C++. I absolutely hated C++ and didn't see the point of OO programming, due in large part because of the way the book presented it. At the start, the author had you write a C program, and throughout the course of the book, you would change it into a C++ program full of OO goodness. The final C++ program wound up having 50% more lines of code for the exact same functionality, and that was the point where I gave up on it. It was a pretty bad first impression.
So maybe you're reading from the wrong book?
If you can't convince them, convict them.
I don't get it. If you try searching for jobs programming in C, you'll find that almost everything that matches the search is Objective C, C++, or C# (or, on some poorly run job sites,a C++ or C# job where the punctuation got lost and it's displayed as C). Sometimes a job will say C/C++. C is rare as hen's teeth except for embedded development and there aren't *that* many jobs in embedded development.
I just went to monster.com and searched for C. What I found starting at the top was:
-- C++ job that lost the punctuation
-- Objective-C
-- C# job that lost the punctuation
-- C/C++
-- Objective-C
-- C/C++, C#
-- C/C++
-- Objective-C
etc. The first C job was item 14 (and is embedded). The next C job, ignoring the false hits on such things as A B C, was item 24 (also embedded), and C wasn't the main skill required. So how in the world can C be number one?
Objects simply allow for an efficient programming structure for large software. That's the main reason. The real debate is about how far this object orientation should go. There are people like me that are of the opinion: use objects when necessary for structure. Others on the other hand will wrap anything in layers of objects. Dynamic allocation isn't strictly necessary for object support (see C++ to know why). It's just that most object oriented languages now also want to use polymorphism, at that point dynamic allocation is necessary cause it's near impossible for the compiler to predict what'll happen. But it's a rather pointless debate in the long run. To each his own as they say.
It's like the static vs dynamic linking debate that you sometimes hear. There's no real valid answer to that one either, it's a best guess on what'll lead to the best performance. With dynamic linking you don't need to load all the libraries at the start, on the other hand with static linking you don't need to call up the linker each time a library is loaded, and so on... My main advice: stay out of it. There's no real valid answer to these sort of things.
Of course you can write object-oriented code in C. It has been done many times.
An object-oriented language has lots of syntactic help for the purpose, but all languages compile to some type of runtime code structure. If you understand what code gives the object-oriented behavior you want, then you can write it in C.
And yes, the poster who said C was assembler-like likely has never seen an assembler language, I would guess. I do remember writing a C routine once which had an initialized array containing hex representations of machine code to do a particular highly specialized task, and then using some coding wizardry to get the locus of control into that array when needed. Ah, those were the days.
Considering that C++ was originally implemented as a preprocessor for C, there's an existence proof that says you are wrong.
Say you're coding a graphical interface and you want two buttons for okay and cancel. They both need to be blue. The toolkit yours using will have an object called Button that has the basic characteristics of what a button its, e.g., a clickable icon that does something. You sub class this Button and give it the specifics.
Button okay = new Button;
Button cancel = new Button;
You now have two objects of type Button. Next you get specific.
okay.onClick(proceed());
cancel.onClick(abort());
okay.color("00f");
cancel.color("00f");
This is terrible pseudocode butyou get the idea. instead of having to code buttons from scratch, you sub class them and only add what you need. typing on a tablet so I hope I haven't been unclear.
OK:
typedef struct button {
long long color[3];
void (*onClick)(int);
} Button;
Button okay;
Button cancel;
okay.onClick =
cancel.onClick =
okay.color[2] = 0xffffffff;
cancel.color[2] = 0xffffffff;
The C version is probably smaller and faster than your version.
doesn't need to be void, even. (I'm sure purists will complain about _t being reserved)
[header file] ...
typedef struct something_s something_t;
something_t *private stuff;
[C file] ...
struct something_s {
};
I use this sort of construct quite a lot.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
I'm guessing this was because the authors were exhibiting uselessly "object-oriented" toy programs to illustrate language features. You'd probably have had a different first impression if you'd started with Cocoa and Objective-C. While it hadn't been updated in years and consequently seems to have disappeared down the memory hole, one of Apple's old Cocoa tutorials was something to the effect of "Build a Text Editor in 15 Minutes", where they showed how you could build a TextEdit-like rich text editor with Cocoa in a couple pages of code.
In fact, it's pretty easy figure out how to do this starting from the Xcode "document-based application" template, as there's not much more to it than replacing the label control in the document window with a Text View and implementing a couple methods in the document class to get and set its contents.
the idea of object oriented vs. non object oriented languages has always thrown me off.
Everyone else will attempt to explain OO using OO terms to a non-OO programmer. Thats like trying to teach my dog to sail a boat by speaking Japanese. I'll try a different tack. You know what a computed goto is, right (other than pure unadulterated evil, right?) What if your compiler enforced the hell out of good commenting and error bound checking to let you do computed goto's safely (er, more or less)? Well that is barely scratching the surface of OO. Syntactic sugar mounded on top of syntactic sugar. You know that quote about turtles all they way down, well fundamentally no matter the paradigm its Turing machines all they way down... more or less.
but really slashdot, what is the big draw to OO
When your professor was a little baby skript kiddie wannabe on his TRS-80 Coco-2 running OS/9 and BASIC09 and liking it, object orientation was the silver bullet among the crowd who could not bother to read "the mythical man month" by Brooks. So now you suffer thru OO because it was "cool" back when parachute pants were also cool, and leggings. Much as we're now raising a crop of wannabe skript kiddies who look up to the functional programming and agile methods people who have also never read "the mythical man month" by Brooks, so your kids / my grandkids are going to have to learn functional programming as The_One_True_Paradigm_And_all_disbelievers_should_be_burned_at_the_stake. And I'll still be writing device driver code on PIC microcontrollers in raw assembly, and it'll work great and I'll be liking it.
There's a really nice wiki article you probably need to read. The world is a lot bigger than "OO" "non-OO".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_paradigms
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And yes, the poster who said C was assembler-like likely has never seen an assembler language,
C doesn't look like 6502 or 1802 or 10f220 assembly, but if you squint you can see some PDP-11 addressing modes in there. Because a primary dev box was a ....
Also I see aspects of BAL from MVS370 but maybe thats just dead brain cells flickering.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What the fuck? Why the fuck would I subclass a button just to make it blue? That's just data, and damned trivial data at that. If your button object doesn't already have some mechanism for dealing with that data, it sucks and I'm using a different object, not yours.
Instead of having to code buttons from scratch, you sub class them...
No no no no NO. Goddamnit NO. Fucking Java. Motherfucking Javascript. They've ruined a generation of programmers.
Subclassing is the LAST thing you should be doing. The very last. First you should be using the customization features built in to the object, and using them directly on an instance of that object. Set the blue color on the Button class and be done with it. If that's not sufficient, use object composition. Most of the time, your object is NOT a Button. It's a something that needs to have a button. Only as a last possible resort do you subclass Button, and you'd damn well better be writing an object that still is-a Button. If you're not, you've done it WRONG.
Except that if you read his code, he's not actually subclassing Button, he's instantiating it. He's certainly saying it wrong, though.
OK, with you so far...
But you're still trying to teach your dog to sail using sailing terms!
Now if on the other hand your dog was Japanese...
Ah, but is he sailing on a starboard tack or a port tack? And should he tack or jibe the boat? And should he attach the sheets to the tack or the clew of the sail?
So, you think that is object-orientation? Oh boy.
From wikipedia: "Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm using "objects" - data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions - to design applications and computer programs."
The GP's method certainly qualifies. Just because it doesn't include all the sugary syntax or features that are included in your favorite so-called "OOP language" doesn't mean that you can't do object-oriented programming in C.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Oh, but it is. C is actually very, very close to assembly language, with only the most unimportant CPU-specific details abstracted away. The primitive types in C are almost always natively supported by the CPU in assembly language, with few exceptions. Instead of having to manage your own stack, it mostly manages it for you, but it still leaves plenty of room for shenanigans, particularly because it doesn't enforce the number of arguments any more than asm does. And if you use varargs, you pretty much are doing direct accesses to the stack using indexed addressing. Simple asm.
Accesses to a struct are just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar on top of an indexed load/store. Goto is a jmp, setjmp and longjmp just set a register and then perform a jump to that address The if/then commands have near exact ASM equivalents (albeit with a couple of extra jump instructions thrown in), and even while loops are just a couple of instructions (not counting whatever calculations must be performed to determine which path to take).
C abstracts away some stack management details, register quantity limits, etc., but it really is little more than portable assembly language, by design. It was intended for systems-level programming, and does that job well, in part because it is such a thin layer compared with most other languages.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Oh, and by the way, you left color[0] and [1] undefined on both of your Buttons.
The C standard requires the compiler initialize all stack-allocated memory to zero. color[0] and color[1] are exactly as the OP specified. To be safe, they should indeed be initialized to zero. In professional practice, I always memset everything I allocate to 0 for the entire block of memory I have allocated, and then initialize individual members of structures to whatever their default value should be.
The C standard requires static variables to be initialized to zero by default. Stack variables that aren't explicitly initialized can be random garbage.
To verify that I'm correct, I just tested it:
The advantage of the object oriented paradigm is not primarily that it makes programming easier or faster. It is the better support of separation between different components, which makes it possible to contain the complexity of large projects with multiple software engineers.
Of course, there are other ways of handling large projects (for example, there are examples of large projects written in C that control complexity by conventions about the separation of data and modules). But the object oriented paradigm is a common choice for large software engineering projects.
You might miss this when learning from a text book, since you are often only given small code examples and toy object hierarchies. But that extra 'overhead' around the defining of object abstraction pays off as the complexity increases. For many problems, thinking in terms of objects rather than instruction sequences can make the problem easier to solve.
Starting off with C and moving to C++ is not necessarily a good process, as you will not begin to learn to think in terms of objects; it is a completely different way of problem solving. Even for experienced programmers, the transition from C to C++ can be a six month process, not because of the extra language features, but because it requires a change in approach. Many don't stick at it long enough to realize the benefits.
The trade-off over speed is not an issue at all; for example, C++ is not significantly slower than C. Speed is affected far more by other choices; data structures and algorithms, memory localization, parallelism, and so on.
And you would also be aware that there are other paradigms as well, such as functional programming. These paradigms are not just "different tools for the job". They can have a radical impact on problem solving methods.
I think that falls under "I hope to the great FSM that I never have to maintain your code."
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
It's about mentioning this "god" fantasy thing
It's no fantasy.
God started out as a C coder, got bored and tried to rebuild the project in a self-built language similar to Brainfuck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck, now called DNA. The signs are everywhere - in fact GCC is still being used in places, notably to produce Alanine.
Of course, it's an old project, abandoned long ago. There's cruft, commented out code and dependencies everywhere, The APIs are wildly inconsistent, the whole thing is a virus and worm magnet. Even fork bombs are rarely trapped.
The documentation is archaic and unreadable, rewritten from the original by ancient geeks.Modern coders can only guess at what it means, and according to Nietzsche, the guy who wrote it left the company long ago.
About the only thing going for it is a very effective, if slightly weird, bootstrapping process.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
If you look at the description of how they compute the index, it's essentially useless for any practical purpose. So why even bother debating it?