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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.
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
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.
You will often see comments to the effect that C is like assembler or that you can do anything in C it just lacks some syntactic sugar. But that is very wrong. Yes, you can to some degree emulate object oriented programming in C. But how would you go about changing your memory allocation (malloc) to use a copying garbage collector? Or do lazy evaluation Haskell style? How do you implement zero-cost exception handling? (longjmp is NOT zero-cost because it requires setjmp).
These concepts are easy for a compiler that compiles directly to assembly language. Often less mature compilers will compile to C as an intermediate language, but in that case the compiler will not be able to generate the most efficient code. For example, a compiler that uses C as intermediate step can implement exceptions using setjmp/longjmp but this adds extra code at every function call. A compiler that goes directly to assembler can implement exception unrolling using static knowledge about the stack instead for a so called zero-cost exception handling solution.
Similarly, a compiler using C as intermediate will be forced to use a conservative garbage collector such as the Boehm GC. Using more efficient solutions such as a copying garbage collector is simply not possible without knowledge of the stack layout.
So strange... I find Ayn Rand completely guilty of the very same romantic notions that got the founders of Communism (she so despised) into so much hot water. Perhaps its true what they say about choosing your enemies well. Both presumed that the underlying greatness and magnificence of the human spirit either as a society or as a specific productive individual would prove the guiding light for humanity. In fact humanity has shown precious few guiding lights and for the most part, we are little descended from our primate ancestors. This isn't to say that we aren't capable of transcendence, simply that you can't depend on that to build a social or philosophical framework.
Design the system that demands human transcendence, inspires greatness, and puts strict limits to personal power and responsibly accounts for the grosser of human foibles and frailties, and you'll have a winner. We had that system in the form of checks and balances, until the "Randian" among us began to systematically dismantle those very defenses against our poorer natures, beginning in the 80s. Up until then, we had the time and means to look at the future we wanted as a society, not just a few social (read financial) elites, and strive towards that future wisely and with due consideration. Now we're in a kettle of fish. Those elite have proven to be every bit as ignorant, self obsessed/serving and foolish as everyone else and they've squandered the future on extra McMansions, expensive cars and yachts, and the virtual hijacking of our society.
C is a great language. You can't any closer to bare metal without slugging assembly around, and as we move to more and more intelligent particles infiltrating everything from household appliances to ubiquitous sensors in the roads we drive on, you better believe that C will bring consciousness to the dross matter that surrounds us. I can only hope, that we can put aside our prejudices (not only racial, but societal), and begin to replace belief systems with educated inquiry, and treat the future with our intelligence rather than our primate predilections. It is the only hope I can see for a future worth living in.
I think you're looking for Objectivist C.
Don't knock having primate ancestors. Some of my best friends are primates.
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.
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.
Anyone who complains about STL portability issues clearly hasn't written a line of C++ code in the past decade. STL is the single most portable and consistent library behind the C standard library. And don't even get me started about efficiency psuedo-arguments. std::sort outperforms qsort by a huge margin on most platforms.
And--I know I'm going to be stoned for this--Linus =/= God.
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?
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.
Christ, only on /. could the statement "Objective C is now more popular than C++" turn into a pissing match about objectivism and then morph into a discussion about evolutionary behaviorism. I don't know if I should be disappointed or proud, to be honest.
An OO language breaks the organization of THINGS in a very natural way for western thinkers.
Yes. And that right there is a subtle trap.
The first problem is that the "tree of subclasses" organisation, while on the surface seeming natural, is not in fact an accurate description of real taxonomies found either in nature or in large software projects. Especially so if the "software" includes business data. It turns out there are an awful lot of platypuses in the real world, things which simply don't fit neatly into the tree.
For example, a classic "toy" example often used in the OO analysis world is a database of employees. Lets see, we have managers, and we have workers. Great, we can subclass those! We'll have an abstract Person class, then personWorker and personManager who are subclasses of Person. Instantiate Jack Smith as an instance of class personWorker. Problem sol - um. Wait. Jack just got promoted from a worker to a manager. Crap. Can our OO system of choice handle dynamically changing an object's class during its lifetime? No, it enforces strict classing, so it can't. Oops. No problem, we'll delete Jack and recreate... oh. His entire work history was attached to that object, linked by opaque reference and not by name or staff ID, and now it's all gone forever. Double crap. Oh well. He's left the company anyway, and now he's come back as a private contractor. We'll just make him a new personContractor. Easy. Yeah, wait, now we're dealing with him also over in the billing system as a personSupplier. But wait, there's more, he just bought some stuff from us, so he's also a personCustomer! Now he's three classes at once! The universe has gone crazy!
Most real OO systems "solve" this problem by either not doing inheritance here at all - therefore completely invalidating the "OO is about inheritance" line - or duplicating the data in multiple objects - thereby invalidating the "OO is about modelling the business domain directly" line. But at this point we're really starting to lose most of the advantages of OO entirely.
But there's a second, even more subtle problem: although OO usually uses "class" as a synonym for "type", it turns out that subclasses are NOT at all the same thing mathematically as a subtype. (Because you can override the behaviour of a class, meaning its behaviour is now not a strict subset of its superclass, but can also be a superset.) In fact there's no really sensible definition of "subtype" at all - Liskov substitutability requires that you define a context within which you want to limit your idea of "equality", and over the scope and lifetime of a sufficiently large software system, that context is going to change radically. So there goes all your type safety. Add in runtime reflection (which was a fundamental principle of Smalltalk, the first OO system, but seems to be an optional add-on recently tossed haphazardly back into the modern variety) and things get even more confused.
And finally, even the idea of typing can become a third subtle trap. Even if you could (which you can't in the real world) restrict your software system to a neat tree of subclasses corresponding exactly to strict subtypes in a glorious Platonic universe - if you look at your code carefully, you find out that your class/type structure, no matter how strict and clever you make it, doesn't actually tell you anything about the behaviour of your objects. It only tells you the calling signature. That you've defined an addOne method in all your IncrementableByOne class structures doesn't mean that any of those subclasses actually have to implement int addOne(int X) as returning X plus one - just that they receive and emit an integer. So after all your compile-time declarations, you've gained a whole lot of not much at all, and you have to implement a whole testing harness apparatus to do by hand what your compiler initially promised it will do.
tl;dr: Just like (insert a political philosophy you dislike), OO is a big idea, a seductive idea, but not actually a correct idea. And attempting to apply thoughtlessly will cause pain.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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."
Linus is a pretty smart kernel programmer & architect who programs almost exclusively in C. It's no surprise that he doesn't even want to grok C++.